What was the most shocking thing you saw whilst in Iraq?
The clash of the civilizations to use the very unfashionable term, but just the difference in our cultures, and the difference in cultures within Iraq itself. I think to sort of say, well the Muslims do this, and we don't. We, as what? We are British, and we've got Muslims in Britain, and I can guarantee those good Muslims in Britain wouldn't do that sort of thing either. It was very much a cultural, even a tribal thing, and some of the ways they behaved was just absolutely an athema to anything I've ever seen or experienced. There was one particular shocking incident where I saw, we'd just dealt with a device under a bridge, and there was a lady, sort of doing her washing, hanging out her washing in the back garden, and her hijab slipped, slightly revealing her face. We all sort of looked at her because she was incredibly beautiful. We'd not seem someone dressed in a burqa before, with the whole hijab coming down, and this beautiful heart shaped face, and these beautiful piercing brown eyes. We sort of all stared, without really thinking about it, wasn't in this sort of lecherous way, it was just, we're in the middle of the desert, and suddenly there's this beautiful woman there. It wasn't a sexual thing either, she wasn't dressed in a sexual, provocative way, shed just had this beautiful face that we not really seen any female Iraqis like this before. Her husband saw this, and just went absolutely apoplectic, and started laying into her, and started beating her. I was thinking to myself, this really, really, isn't right, I need go in there; I need to weigh it in there. I didn't, and the guys were saying, “Come on boss, we need to do something“, and we didn't because I told them not to, and eventually we noticed she revealed she was pregnant. I felt incredibly, incredibly, bad about it. Went back and spoke to the other boys, because they really weren't talking to me after about it, and I think most of us were fairly shocked by what we saw, it's fair to say. I went back and told the boys a story about a British infantry patrol the year previously, who had been patrolling through Bazaar, and just outside the area of the palace, where the Sunni area was. They'd spoken to this young eleven year old, girl, chatted to her, nothing improper or untoward, and her father had seen this, came outside, grabbed her, dragged her in the house, and beat her. You could hear her screams from outside, and the guys were incensed by this. The next day they went past, and saw him, and gave him a bit of summary justice. The way he responded to that beating was to go and grab his daughter and cut her throat to protect his honor. I explained this to the guys. I said, “We just can't, we're not here to play judge and jury, there's nothing we can do about this. We just have to except that our cultures are totally different, and there's thing that happen here that would ever happen back home, but we're not here to change the way they live and tell them what's right and what's wrong'. Although personally, whilst I would never dream of telling someone their religion is right or wrong, I still can't see how any tribe, or culture, or religion can accept that sort of behavior to defend someone honor. It's just astonishing.
