Sweden’s largest newspaper, Dagens Nyheter, published an interview April 11 with a Swedish researcher of Middle Eastern ancestry who had gone to Iraq to serve as a human shield. Khaled Bayoumi told the newspaper, “I happened to be right there just as the American troops encouraged people to begin the plundering.”
He described how US soldiers shot security guards at a local government building on Haifa Avenue on the west bank of the Tigris, and then “blasted apart the doors to the building.” Next, according to Bayoumi, “from the tanks came eager calls in Arabic encouraging people to come close to them.”
At first, he said, residents were hesitant to come out of their homes because anyone who had tried to cross the street in the morning had been shot. “Arab interpreters in the tanks told the people to go and take what they wanted in the building,” Bayoumi continued. “The word spread quickly and the building was ransacked. I was standing only 300 yards from there when the guards were murdered. Afterwards the tank crushed the entrance to the Justice Department, which was in a neighboring building, and the plundering continued there.
“I stood in a large crowd and watched this together with them. They did not partake in the plundering but dared not to interfere. Many had tears of shame in their eyes. The next morning the plundering spread to the Modern Museum, which lies a quarter mile farther north. There were also two crowds there, one that plundered and one that watched with disgust.”
