Video- Blackwater in Iraq runs woman

Newly-released videos show the US private contractor in Iraq, formerly known as Blackwater, running over a woman with a car, smashing into Iraqi cars to move them out of the way and firing a rifle into traffic in 2006.

The videos were released by Harper’s Magazine.

The videos are included in a piece by Charles Glass titled “The Warrior Class” that looks at the rise of private security contractors. Glass had been shown the videos by a former Blackwater employee.

Glass described one of the videos dated April 2006 that shows a woman being hit by a Blackwater vehicle.

“A woman in a black full-length burqa began to cross the street. The vehicle struck the woman and knocked her unconscious body into the gutter,” Glass wrote.

“The cars slowed for a moment, but did not stop, nor did they even determine whether the victim was dead or alive. A voice in the car taking the video said, ‘Oh, my God!’ Yet no one was heard on the radio requesting help for her. Most sickeningly, the sequence had been set to an AC/DC song, whose pounding, metallic chorus declared: ‘You’ve been… thunderstruck!'” he added.

Glass also said that the tape he was shown ended with the inscription, “In support of security, peace, freedom and democracy everywhere.”

The incidents in the videos added more fuel to evidence that the company “encouraged and rewarded the destruction of Iraqi life.”

Blackwater is the mercenary firm founded as Blackwater USA in 1996. It received no-bid contracts from the administration of former US President George W. Bush in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Amid scandals over misbehavior by Blackwater employees in Iraq, the company renamed itself Blackwater Worldwide in 2007, Xe Services in 2009, and Academi in 2011.

Despite the scandals and misconduct reports associated with the company over the past years, the administration of US President Barack Obama has awarded Academi a USD250 million contract to work for the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency in Afghanistan.