Iraq said on Thursday it is scrapping the licence of controversial US security firm Blackwater because of a 2007 shooting in downtown Baghdad involving its guards in which several civilians died. The notice, which comes as Iraqis are set to go to the polls on Saturday for the first time since 2005, is certain to win favour among voters in a nation still angry over the deadly incident.
"The contract is finished and will be not be renewed by order of the minister of the interior," interior ministry spokesman Major General Abdel Karim Khalaf told AFP, without giving a specific date. Blackwater World-wide, a major US State Department contractor in Iraq, is being expelled over the deaths of Iraqi civilians in Nisur Square, a busy Baghdad intersection, on September 16, 2007, Khalaf said.
"It is because of the shooting incident in 2007," he said. "They came to us and applied and we refused them. They tried by all means to stay here and we said, 'no'." An Iraqi investigation found that 17 civilians were killed and 20 wounded in the incident in which Blackwater guards opened fire with automatic weapons while escorting an American diplomatic convoy through Baghdad. The firm and its founder Erik Prince maintain its guards were responding to fire and acting in self-defence, but residents such as Afrah Abbas, 20, whose mother was killed in the shooting, adamantly rejected such claims on Thursday.
"They are criminals, and we don't want criminals in our country," Abbas told AFP. "I feel better now. This is the revenge that I and all of the families of the victims wanted," she said. Five former Blackwater guards pleaded not guilty on January 6 in a Washington court over the killing of 14 Iraqi civilians and wounding 18 others by gunfire and grenades. Their trial is expected to begin on January 29, 2010.
Critics have repeatedly accused Blackwater of having a cowboy mentality and a shoot-first-ask-questions-later approach when carrying out security duties in Iraq. Headquartered in North Carolina, Blackwater is one of the biggest security firms working in war-torn Iraq with about 1,000 staff, and since the 2003 invasion has been employed to protect US government personnel.
The company was not immediately available for comment on the licence refusal, which comes ahead of the provincial polls in which Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki has thrown his support behind the State of Law Coalition list. A US embassy official in Baghdad confirmed they had received the official notification but could not say when the firm would leave or what action would be taken to find a replacement.
"We don't have specifics about dates. We are working with the government of Iraq and our contractors to address the implications of this decision," the official said. After the incident in the Iraqi capital, the government pressed the State Department to withdraw Blackwater from the country, but the security firm's contract was renewed in 2008.
Foreign security teams in Iraq have long operated in a legal grey area, but under a military accord signed with Washington in November, Iraq obtained a key concession to lift the immunity to prosecution previously extended to US security contractors.
Blackwater first came under the spotlight on March 31, 2004, when four of their employees were killed by an angry mob in Fallujah, about one hour by car west of Baghdad. The crowd mutilated their bodies and hung them from a bridge. The shocking images were broadcast world-wide and helped trigger a month-long US assault on Fallujah, a Sunni Arab insurgent stronghold, that left 36 US soldiers, 200 insurgents and 600 Iraqi civilians dead.
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