WITH elbows bandaged and knees padded for comfort, Abu Othman lay face down on a Ramadi rooftop and cradled his Russian-made sniper rifle as he waited for the tall American soldier to appear.

The soldier’s habit of urinating into the street from the top of his Bradley armoured vehicle had angered Sunni Muslim inhabitants of the tree-lined suburb he patrolled. It was not the urinating as such that offended them; it was the way he exposed himself regardless of whether any women were around to see him.

In the end an old man came forward to demand his death. He complained to insurgents that the soldier had strafed his street, destroying several cars and a trailer at a cost of thousands of dollars.

The insurgents responded by firing a rocket-propelled grenade at the Bradley. It missed. A few days later they tried to blow up the vehicle with a Russian C5K missile. The missile missed, too. That was when they sent for Abu Othman.

It was a long, hot wait that summer’s day on the rooftop. Abu Othman was glad of his headphones. He played his favourite verses from the Koran and their soothing flow cleared his mind, infusing him with a determination to see through the assignment, come what may. He prayed for God to deliver his target.

“Then the call came on my mobile phone, informing me that the soldier and his vehicle were finally heading my way,” he said.

“The moment finally arrived. The Bradley stopped and the soldier stood on it ready to relieve himself. He was relaxed. He put his hand on his trousers. I took aim and fired one shot and saw him drop dead.”

Abu Othman punctuated the story with praise to Allah for his success. “It was the perfect situation for me,” he said. “The soldier was standing and that made him such an easy target.”

In the world of the Iraqi insurgent, Abu Othman — not his real name — is something of a celebrity. Known to all as The Sniper, he is acclaimed for the consistency with which he dispatches victims from ranges of 1,000 metres or more.

The tale of how a humble calligrapher became a renowned marksman by teaching himself from websites, honing his skills with computer games and studying Hollywood films such as The Deer Hunter is the stuff of legend in the Sunni triangle of militant towns to the north and west of Baghdad.

One commander after another had boasted to me of his prowess and when a meeting was finally arranged at a house in the capital’s suburbs last week, the most striking thing about Abu Othman was his unadulterated pride in killing.

He claimed to have killed 29 men in all — 20 Americans and nine Iraqis. “I want to cry when I speak about my work,” he said at one point during an interview that lasted long into the night. “I am so afraid that God will deprive me of this talent that he bestowed upon me.”

Abu Othman’s story reflects the speed with which the US soldiers who ousted Saddam Hussein came to be seen even by some of the dictator’s enemies as occupiers who must be repelled; and the discipline and determination at the core of an outwardly chaotic insurgency that has claimed more than 1,000 American lives.

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