Within 20 minutes, the soldiers left without arresting him or his mother. While the soldiers went next door to search his neighbor's house, Imaad began to slap his mother, he said. "The American people are devils," Um Imaad recalled her son repeating.
He left her and went to a mosque to spend the night. "I asked God to forgive me," Imaad said, "because I could not prevent American sins."
The Army's Task Force Baghdad, which includes soldiers from the 1st Cavalry and 82nd Airborne Divisions, are mainly responsible for securing the capital city.
Lt. Col. James Hutton, a spokesman for the 1st Cavalry, said Task Force Baghdad soldiers were not involved in the raid that night. He said other U.S. units, including military police, operate in Baghdad but that he had no information about their possible involvement.
Army Lt. Col. Daniel Baggio, another military spokesman in Baghdad, said he also could not confirm that a raid took place that night. "That sort of behavior is not condoned by the U.S. military, and I find it hard to believe U.S. soldiers would do that," he said. "I'm not saying it didn't happen. It just seems odd."
Neighbors corroborated parts of Imaad's account. They said the soldiers raided their houses on Jan. 5, telling them that they were responding to an explosion in the area. One man said a soldier angrily punched him and broke his nose. The injury was apparent a week later.
They said American soldiers raided one side of the street, and Iraqi security forces raided another. They said the soldiers arrived in armored vehicles and left after about two hours, taking several Iraqi civilians with them.
The neighborhood is known to harbor insurgents, including some who moved to Baghdad from Fallujah after a U.S. offensive there in November. Neighbors acknowledged there were anti-American groups among them, but they said not everyone opposed the foreign troops or Iraq's U.S.-backed interim government.
Imaad and his mother said they had no memorable encounters with soldiers before Jan. 5, no reason to hate or mistrust them. But Um Imaad said she had been distraught since that night at the changes in her son, a plump man with a round face and a receding hairline. His father died in the Iran-Iraq war two decades ago, leaving mother and son with only each other for support.
Um Imaad, who wore a simple white scarf tucked around her brown, crinkled face, said that after the raid she thought she was going to lose her son, too. "He had a crisis," she said, explaining what happened.
Um Imaad brought Imaad pills from the doctor to try to calm him. He looked at the yellow ones, then the red ones and refused to take them. "All these belong to Jewish people," he said, pushing one set aside. "And these others are from bad or foreign people."
Imaad said that two weeks after the raid, he was still struggling to return to normal. He was no longer hitting his mother, but he still would not allow her to watch foreign television or buy products made outside Iraq.
Imaad said he was embracing his Muslim faith as never before. He spends most of his time at the mosque praying or reading the Koran. He is also looking for a job.
Before the war, Imaad worked for a commerce company, making about $50 a month and spending most of it on transportation. He has not been able to find work in the nearly two years since.
He never really held the Americans responsible for that, he said, until the night of Jan. 5.
"I used to have a good opinion of the Americans," Imaad said. "But they are the enemy. They are bad."
