Word: airports
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...Mehdi, 58, woke up on the morning of June 25, packed a lunch for himself and his son, as he often does, and left his home in Baghdad's central Karrada district at 7:30 a.m. He was driving his 1996 maroon Opel Vita en route to Baghdad International Airport, where he has worked at the airport bank for the past 13 years...
That morning Mehdi ran into his 21-year-old son Mohammed, who works as a driver shuttling bank employees to and from work. His son had been stopped in traffic at a checkpoint on the way to the airport, with six people stuffed in his car. Having a VIP pass that allows him to proceed through checkpoints without waiting in the usual lines, Mehdi volunteered to take a couple of female passengers off his son's hands. Maha Adnan Youssef, 31, and Suroor Shahid Ahmed, 32, decided to switch cars...
...office, he was surprised to see that his father still hadn't shown up. When a co-worker popped his head in to tell Mohammed his father's car had broken down, he got back on the road to see what the problem was. Not far from the airport, Mohammed discovered his father's vehicle consumed by flames, with an American military convoy preventing him from getting any closer. "I was in agony trying to do something," he told TIME a week later. "Seeing my father burning in the vehicle, I fainted...
According to a U.S. military press release issued the same day, a car carrying "three criminals" opened fire on a convoy of U.S. troops stopped on the roadside on the way to Baghdad International Airport at 8:40 a.m. "The Soldiers [from the 4th Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division] returned fire, which resulted in the vehicle running off the road and striking a wall. The vehicle then exploded," read the release. The military statement also said that "a weapon was recovered from the wreckage" and "two MND-B convoy vehicles received bullet hole damage from the small arms fire...
...airport-road deaths have proved especially infuriating to Iraqis while their government is engaged in talks to establish the long-term legal status of U.S. troops and contractors operating in their country. Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki was so outraged by the shooting that last month he ordered a formal court inquiry into the incident. Should the Iraqi judge assigned to the case decide to summon as witnesses the American soldiers involved, he will pose a direct challenge to the current legal status of actions carried out by U.S. troops in the country. Perhaps even more critical at this...