An Iraqi refugee accused of plotting to help terrorists back home may himself have been an insurgent during the war. When he goes on trial this month, several U.S. soldiers will be watching from the gallery who suspect his roadside bombs may have killed their comrades in Iraq in 2005.
Mohanad Shareef Hammadi, 24, is scheduled for trial Aug. 28, but not in connection with the battlefield deaths of six Pennsylvania National Guardsmen seven years ago. Instead, Hammadi and another Iraqi refugee living in Kentucky, 30-year-old Waad Ramadan Alwan, were charged with trying to send weapons and cash back to al-Qaida in Iraq after they came to the U.S. Alwan has pleaded guilty.
Several current and former soldiers from the same National Guard unit believe Hammadi and Alwan could have had a hand in two roadside bombings that killed six of their buddies in August 2005, when their unit was stationed near the city of Bayji in the volatile Sunni Triangle north of Baghdad. Those six were among 85 U.S. military deaths in Iraq that month.
Documents reviewed by The Associated Press show Hammadi and Alwan were insurgents in the same area around Bayji at the time the Pennsylvanians' Task Force Dragoon was stationed there and hit.
"It's going to be extremely hard to hold my temper, extremely hard to keep cool," said former Sgt. Brandon Miller, one of several former members of the task force who say they plan to attend the trial. Miller, an apartment maintenance manager in Chadds Ford, Pa., was awarded the Purple Heart after surviving a separate roadside bomb blast that destroyed the Humvee he was riding in in Bayji.
Miller and Staff Sgt. Joshua Hedetniemi say the men believe there's a chance Hammadi planted the roadside bombs that killed and injured their fellow soldiers, or fired bullets at them as snipers.
"A lot of the time, there's not a face to put with the actions, there's not a tangible enemy," Hedetniemi said. "It's very tough to pin down that type of enemy."
Hedetniemi said, based on the publicly available evidence and the timeline of his unit's deployment in Iraq, he is certain Alwan and Hammadi were among the insurgents who attacked his unit.
"There's no doubt he was in the same area we were," Hedetniemi told The Associated Press. "The evidence suggests that."
Multiple sources place Task Force Dragoon in the same violent area where Alwan and Hammadi told an FBI informant they worked two years into the American-led war. Those sources include motions filed in court, criminal complaints and indictments of Alwan and Hammadi, search warrants for the two men's shared apartment and computers, media accounts of the task force's deployment and interviews with soldiers.
Neither the U.S. Attorney's office in Louisville nor the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington, D.C., have publicly identified any unit they believe Alwan and Hammadi attacked and would not say if the pair was involved with attacks on the Pennsylvania National Guard unit.
Eugene Fidell, co-founder of the National Institute of Military Justice who teaches military law at Yale Law School, said it would be possible, but tough, to bring murder charges against someone for killing a soldier in a war zone. Fidell added that definitively showing Hammadi and Alwan attacked this unit and took part in the killing of at least six soldiers would be equally tough.
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