Stadium renovation won’t erase painful past

[unhappycamper]

Built in 1970, Haditha’s soccer stadium looks like it hasn’t been used for sports in a long time.


Stadium renovation won’t erase painful past
By Jimmy Norris, Stars and Stripes
Mideast edition, Saturday, November 8, 2008

HADITHA, Iraq — Built in 1970, Haditha’s soccer stadium looks like it hasn’t been used for sports in a long time.

Discarded concertina wire and sandbags litter the ground alongside spent .50-caliber and 7.62-millimeter casings. The parts of the grandstand not reduced to rubble are pockmarked with the impact craters from small-arms fire. Stray animals have taken up residence in what used to be the restrooms.

Walls along the field’s perimeter are scrawled with slogans from the time of the Baath Party regime saying, "Long live Saddam." Later writings left during al-Qaida’s tenure in the city say, "The Americans failed."

"We’ll need to paint over that," said Jalal Qaradaghi, an embedded provincial reconstruction team engineer working out of Combat Operating Post Haditha. "Maybe with flowers or Olympic symbols — something to match the soccer field."

Harder to paint over are painful memories of the stadium. In 2006, during some of the heaviest fighting of the insurgency, members of al-Qaida forced Haditha citizens to watch from the stands as they shot and beheaded 80 residents for offenses ranging from breaking Islamic law to being police officers.


Rest of article at: http://www.stripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=58689



uhc comment: I'm sure the residents also remember the killing of 24 citizens in November, 2005 --> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haditha_killings