[News] 'US soldiers started to shoot us, one by one'

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(below) One incident. Forty dead. Two stories. What really happened? (below)

'US soldiers started to shoot us, one by one'
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1221658,00.html

Survivors describe wedding massacre as generals refuse to apologise

Rory McCarthy in Ramadi
Friday May 21, 2004
<http://www.guardian.co.uk>The Guardian

The wedding feast was finished and the women had just led the young bride 
and groom away to their marriage tent for the night when Haleema Shihab 
heard the first sounds of the fighter jets screeching through the sky above.

It was 10.30pm in the remote village of Mukaradeeb by the Syrian border and 
the guests hurried back to their homes as the party ended. As sister-in-law 
of the groom, Mrs Shihab, 30, was to sleep with her husband and children in 
the house of the wedding party, the Rakat family villa. She was one of the 
few in the house who survived the night.

"The bombing started at 3am," she said yesterday from her bed in the 
emergency ward at Ramadi general hospital, 60 miles west of Baghdad. "We 
went out of the house and the American soldiers started to shoot us. They 
were shooting low on the ground and targeting us one by one," she said. She 
ran with her youngest child in her arms and her two young boys, Ali and 
Hamza, close behind. As she crossed the fields a shell exploded close to 
her, fracturing her legs and knocking her to the ground.

She lay there and a second round hit her on the right arm. By then her two 
boys lay dead. "I left them because they were dead," she said. One, she 
saw, had been decapitated by a shell.

"I fell into the mud and an American soldier came and kicked me. I 
pretended to be dead so he wouldn't kill me. My youngest child was alive 
next to me."

Mrs Shibab's description, backed by other witnesses, of an attack on a 
sleeping village is at odds with the American claim that they came under 
fire while targeting a suspected foreign fighter safe house.

She described how in the hours before dawn she watched as American troops 
destroyed the Rakat villa and the house next door, reducing the buildings 
to rubble.

Another relative carried Mrs Shihab and her surviving child to hospital. 
There she was told her husband Mohammed, the eldest of the Rakat sons, had 
also died.

As Mrs Shihab spoke she gestured with hands still daubed red-brown with the 
henna the women had used to decorate themselves for the wedding. Alongside 
her in the ward yesterday were three badly injured girls from the Rakat 
family: Khalood Mohammed, aged just a year and struggling for breath, Moaza 
Rakat, 12, and Iqbal Rakat, 15, whose right foot doctors had already 
amputated.

By the time the sun rose on Wednesday over the Rakat family house, the raid 
had claimed 42 lives, according to Hamdi Noor al-Alusi, manager of the 
al-Qaim general hospital, the nearest to the village.

Among the dead were 27 members of the extended Rakat family, their wedding 
guests and even the band of musicians hired to play at the ceremony, among 
them Hussein al-Ali from Ramadi, one of the most popular singers in western 
Iraq.

Dr Alusi said 11 of the dead were women and 14 were children. "I want to 
know why the Americans targeted this small village," he said by telephone. 
"These people are my patients. I know each one of them. What has caused 
this disaster?"

Despite the compelling testimony of Mrs Shihab, Dr Alusi and other wedding 
guests, the US military, faced with appar ent evidence of yet another 
scandal in Iraq, offered an inexplicably different account of the operation.

The military admitted there had been a raid on the village at 3am on 
Wednesday but said it had targeted a "suspected foreign fighter safe house".

"During the operation, coalition forces came under hostile fire and close 
air support was provided," it said in a statement. Soldiers at the scene 
then recovered weapons, Iraqi dinar and Syrian pounds (worth approximately 
£800), foreign passports and a "Satcom radio", presumably a satellite 
telephone.

"We took ground fire and we returned fire," said Brigadier General Mark 
Kimmitt, deputy director of operations for the US military in Iraq. "We 
estimate that around 40 were killed. But we operated within our rules of 
engagement."

Major General James Mattis, commander of the 1st Marine Division, was 
scathing of those who suggested a wedding party had been hit. "How many 
people go to the middle of the desert ... to hold a wedding 80 miles 
(130km) from the nearest civilisation? These were more than two dozen 
military-age males. Let's not be naive."

When reporters asked him about footage on Arabic television of a child's 
body being lowered into a grave, he replied: "I have not seen the pictures 
but bad things happen in wars. I don't have to apologise for the conduct of 
my men."

The celebration at Mukaradeeb was to be one of the biggest events of the 
year for a small village of just 25 houses. Haji Rakat, the father, had 
finally arranged a long-negotiated tribal union that would bring together 
two halves of one large extended family, the Rakats and the Sabahs.

Haji Rakat's second son, Ashad, would marry Rutba, a cousin from the 
Sabahs. In a second ceremony one of Ashad's female cousins, Sharifa, would 
marry a young Sabah boy, Munawar.

A large canvas awning had been set up in the garden of the Rakat villa to 
host the party. A band of musicians was called in, led by Hamid Abdullah, 
who runs the Music of Arts recording studio in Ramadi, the nearest major town.

He brought his friend Hussein al-Ali, a popular Iraqi singer who performs 
on Ramadi's own television channel. A handful of other musicians including 
the singer's brother Mohaned, played the drums and the keyboards.

The ceremonies began on Tuesday morning and stretched through until the 
late evening. "We were happy because of the wedding. People were dancing 
and making speeches," said Ma'athi Nawaf, 55, one of the neighbours.

Late in the evening the guests heard the sound of jets overhead. Then in 
the distance they saw the headlights of what appeared to be a military 
convoy heading their way across the desert.

The party ended at around 10.30pm and the neighbours left for their homes. 
At 3am the bombing began. "The first thing they bombed was the tent for the 
ceremony," said Mr Nawaf. "We saw the family running out of the house. The 
bombs were falling, destroying the whole area."

Armoured military vehicles then drove into the village, firing machine guns 
and supported by attack helicopters. "They started to shoot at the house 
and the people outside the house," he said.

Before dawn two large Chinook helicopters descended and offloaded dozens of 
troops. They appeared to set explosives in the Rakat house and the building 
next door and minutes later, just after the Chinooks left again, they 
exploded into rubble.

"I saw something that nobody ever saw in this world," said Mr Nawaf. "There 
were children's bodies cut into pieces, women cut into pieces, men cut into 
pieces."

Among the dead was his daughter Fatima Ma'athi, 25, and her two young boys, 
Raad, four, and Raed, six. "I found Raad dead in her arms. The other boy 
was lying beside her. I found only his head," he said. His sister Simoya, 
the wife of Haji Rakat, was also killed with her two daughters. "The 
Americans call these people foreign fighters. It is a lie. I just want one 
piece of evidence of what they are saying."

Remarkably among the survivors were the two married couples, who had been 
staying in tents away from the main house, and Haji Rakat himself, an 
elderly man who had gone to bed early in a nearby house.

 From the mosques of Ramadi volunteers had been called to dig at the 
graveyard of the tribe, on the southern outskirts of the city.

There lay 27 graves: mounds of dirt each marked with a single square of 
crudely cut marble, a name scribbled in black paint. Some gave more than 
one name, and one, belonging to a woman Hamda Suleman, the briefest of 
explanations: "The American bombing."


One incident. Forty dead. Two stories. What really happened?
By Justin Huggler in Baghdad

http://news.independent.co.uk/low_res/story.jsp?story=523356&host=3&dir=75



21 May 2004

A tiny bundle of blankets is unwrapped; inside is the body of a baby, its 
limbs smeared with dried blood. Then the mourners peel back the blanket 
further to reveal a second dead baby.

Another blanket is opened; inside are the bodies of a mother and child. The 
child, six or seven years old, is lying against his or her mother, as if 
seeking comfort. But the child has no head.

These are the images that American forces in Iraq had no answer to 
yesterday. They come from video footage of the burials of 41 men, women and 
children. The Iraqis say they died when American planes launched air 
strikes on a wedding party near the Syrian border on Wednesday.

US forces insist that the attack was on a safe house used by foreign 
fighters entering Iraq from Syria. They do not dispute that they killed 
about 40 people, but claim American forces were returning fire and the dead 
were all foreign fighters. For the video footage that shows dead women and 
children they have no explanation.

So potentially damaging is the video to the US occupation that American 
officials have demanded that the Dubai-based al-Arabiya television news 
network, which obtained the footage, give them the name of the cameraman 
who took it. Al-Arabiya has refused.

In the footage men weep and cling to the bodies of their loved ones before 
they are buried. There are dozens of bundles wrapped in flower-patterned 
blankets. Some of these images were shown on Western television news 
yesterday, but not the most disturbing: the bodies themselves.

"These were more than two dozen military-age males. Let's not be naive," 
Major General James Mattis, commander of the US 1st Marine Division, said. 
But he had no explanation of where the dead women and children in the video 
came from. "I have not seen the pictures but bad things happen in wars," he 
said cryptically. "I don't have to apologise for the conduct of my men."

US forces say they have been watching the border area where the attack took 
place for some time. They saw a large group of suspicious people moving in 
the area and sent in ground forces, who came under fire, so the US forces 
returned fire.

They are sticking doggedly to this version of events despite growing 
evidence that a wedding party was hit. More and more eyewitnesses are 
coming forward. Hussein Ali, a well-known wedding singer, was buried in 
Baghdad yesterday, alongside his brother Mohammed. Their family said they 
had been performing at the wedding.

The evidence that the US military has put forward to support its version of 
events has been seriously undermined. Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt said 
guns, Syrian passports and a satellite phone had been recovered. But Sheikh 
Nasrallah Miklif, the head of the Bani Fahd tribe to which most of the dead 
belonged, said that was to be expected, given that the air strike happened 
in Makradheeb, a village in the desert, about 10 miles from the Syrian border.

Every household in Iraq has a gun, usually a Kalashnikov assault rifle, to 
protect itself. In the desert it is even more common for people to keep 
guns, as protection not only from robbers, but also wild animals. Shepherds 
need to protect their flocks.

The village is 80 miles from the nearest town, al-Qa'im, and 10 miles from 
the nearest road. There are no telephone lines and no mobile coverage. 
Satellite phones are comparatively cheap in Iraq and it would be surprising 
if the villagers did not have one.

People in the area frequently marry neighbours from across the border. That 
means there have always been villagers on the Iraqi side with Syrian 
passports and vice versa. On top of that, many of the villagers on both 
sides make their living smuggling sheep across the border, and have been 
routinely crossing it for years - not entirely legal, but that does not 
make them foreign fighters planning to attack US forces.

General Mattis asked: "How many people go to the middle of the desert 10 
miles from the Syrian border to hold a wedding 80 miles from the nearest 
civilisation?" Iraqis replied that the victims of the attack were holding 
the wedding in the village where they had lived all their lives.

Sheikh Mikfil was not in the village at the time of the attack, but he has 
spoken at length with the survivors. All of the villagers were members of 
his tribe; the only dead from outside were the musicians. He put the death 
toll at 41 - 25 of whom were members of the bridegroom's family. The 
wedding was held at the home of the bridegroom's father, Rikat Obeid 
Hussein. The newly married couple survived because they were in a specially 
erected honeymoon tent when the bombing began.

The sheikh said that by 2am, when the attack started, the celebrations were 
finished and the guests were asleep. There had been US helicopters in the 
sky earlier, but they had not fired and the wedding guests were not worried.

General Kimmitt said: "We sent a ground force in to the location. They were 
shot at. We returned fire."

But Sheikh Mikfil said the attack began with air strikes, without warning. 
They were followed by helicopters, and after several hours of air strikes, 
US troops arrived in armoured vehicles to search the devastated village.

Contrary to earlier reports, the sheikh said, there was no celebratory 
gunfire. Firing guns in the air is traditional at Iraqi weddings, and it 
was initially suspected that US forces had mistaken such shooting for 
hostile fire, as they did at a wedding party in Afghanistan when US air 
strikes killed more than 50 people in 2002. Sheikh Mikfil says he 
questioned the survivors extensively on this, and they were categorical: 
there was no shooting in the air.

He said the bride came from the same village, so there was no large-scale 
movement of people that could have aroused US suspicions. "If they killed 
foreign fighters, why don't they show us the bodies?" he asked. "If they 
suspected foreign fighters were there, why didn't they come to arrest them, 
instead of using this huge force?"

Sheikh Mikfil said he suspected the Americans might have been acting on 
false intelligence information, given by someone who wanted to increase the 
tension between Iraqis and Americans.

It is impossible to reconcile the American and Iraqi versions of events. 
But with more and more evidence emerging that casts doubt on the American 
version, and Iraqi anger rising, US forces need to come up with some 
answers. If this was one of the "bad things" that "happen in wars" - to use 
General Mattis's phrase - more explanation is required.



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