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<font face="Arial, Helvetica" size=4 color="#0000FF"><i>(below) One
incident. Forty dead. Two stories. What really happened?
(below)<br><br>
</i></font><font face="Arial, Helvetica" size=4><b>'US soldiers started
to shoot us, one by one'</b> <br>
</font><font face="Arial, Helvetica" size=2><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1221658,00.html" eudora="autourl">http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1221658,00.html<br><br>
</a>Survivors describe wedding massacre as generals refuse to apologise
<br><br>
<b>Rory McCarthy in Ramadi<br>
Friday May 21, 2004<br>
<a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk">The Guardian</a></b> <br><br>
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. <br><br>
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. <br><br>
"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. <br><br>
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. <br><br>
"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." <br><br>
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. <br><br>
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. <br><br>
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. <br><br>
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. <br><br>
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. <br><br>
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. <br><br>
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?" <br><br>
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. <br><br>
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". <br><br>
"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. <br><br>
"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." <br><br>
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." <br><br>
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." <br><br>
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.
<br><br>
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. <br><br>
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. <br><br>
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. <br><br>
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. <br><br>
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. <br><br>
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." <br><br>
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. <br><br>
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. <br><br>
"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." <br><br>
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."
<br><br>
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. <br><br>
From the mosques of Ramadi volunteers had been called to dig at the
graveyard of the tribe, on the southern outskirts of the city. <br><br>
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." <br><br>
<br>
</font><font face="Arial, Helvetica" size=4>One incident. Forty dead. Two
stories. What really happened?<br>
</font><font face="Arial, Helvetica" size=2>By Justin Huggler in
Baghdad<br><br>
<a href="http://news.independent.co.uk/low_res/story.jsp?story=523356&host=3&dir=75" eudora="autourl">http://news.independent.co.uk/low_res/story.jsp?story=523356&host=3&dir=75<br><br>
<br><br>
</a>21 May 2004<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
"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."<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
General Kimmitt said: "We sent a ground force in to the location.
They were shot at. We returned fire."<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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?"<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
<br><br>
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