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Wedding party massacre Iraqis claim more than 40 killed in US helicopter attack Rory McCarthy in Baghdad Thursday May 20, 2004 The Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1220750,00.html Iraqi officials last night said an American helicopter fired on a wedding party in western Iraq killing more than 40 people, including many children, in another damaging setback for the US occupation. A senior Iraqi police officer told the Associated Press that a helicopter fired at the party early yesterday morning in a remote village close to the Syrian border, killing between 42 and 45 people. Television footage showed a truck carrying the bodies of the dead arriving in Ramadi, the nearest big town. Many of the dead were clearly children. In a written statement the Pentagon said last night: "Our report is that this was not a wedding party, that these were anti-coalition forces that fired first, and that US troops returned fire, destroying several vehicles, and killing a number of them. "During the operation, coalition forces came under hostile fire and close air support was provided." He said coalition forces on the ground recovered numerous weapons, 2m Iraqi dinars and Syrian pounds, foreign passports and a satcom radio. Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, deputy director of operations for the US military in Iraq, told Reuters the attack targeted "a suspected foreign fighter safe house". The killings, if proven, are certain to damage even further the US military's battered reputation in Iraq. Already the US is reeling from its much-criticised operations in Falluja last month which claimed hundreds of Iraqi lives and now the scandal of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib prison. The attack came on the same day as the US military convicted in a court martial the first soldier involved in the prison abuse, an attempt to rebuild the US military's image among the Iraqi people. Witnesses said yesterday that guests had been firing guns into the air in a traditional sign of celebration before the American helicopter attack in the village of Mukaradeeb, near the town of al-Qaim in western Iraq. Lieutenant Colonel Ziyad al-Jbouri, the deputy police chief for Ramadi, 80 miles west of Baghdad, told AP that the dead included 15 children and 10 women. He said the attack happened at 2:45am yesterday in a desert area near the remote border with Syria. "This was a wedding and the planes came and attacked the people at a house. Is this the democracy and freedom that Bush has brought us? There was no reason," said Dahham Harraj, one man filmed in an AP video. Television footage broadcast last night on the al-Arabiya television channel showed a truck laden with bodies. Men carried the bodies wrapped in blankets from the back of the truck into deep graves in the desert on the outskirts of Ramadi. One body, carried in a white blanket, was that of a young girl aged five or six. Other bodies, laid on the ground in a line, had clearly suffered horrific injuries. One man, wearing a white and black keffiyeh, told the television channel he saw the Americans bomb the village. "We were in Mukaradeeb. At 3am they rained the air with bombs," he said. "One after another the bombs were falling. Three houses with the guests inside were hit. They fired as if there were an armoured brigade inside, not a wedding party." In a video filmed by AP another anonymous man said the victims had been guests at the wedding. "The US military planes came ... and started killing everyone in the house," he said. Salah al-Ani, a doctor at the hospital in Ramadi, told AP the death toll was 45. He said the wedding guests had been firing in the air. American troops had come to investigate and then left. At about 3 am, they returned in helicopters and destroyed two houses. The attack had the hallmarks of a similar incident in Afghanistan two years ago in which a US jet fired at a wedding party in Uruzgan province, in the south, killing 48 Afghan civilians and wounding more than 100. The wedding had been targeted because guests were firing Kalashnikovs in the air as a traditional sign of celebration. After an investigation, the pilots were exonerated and the US military said they had come under fire. The village of Mukaradeeb - "the wolves' den" - is a small remote village of barely a dozen houses in the desert by Iraq's western border. A convoy near the village came under attack by the US military last June, reportedly because the army believed Saddam Hussein was moving through the area, heading towards Syria. More recently US troops have conducted aggressive operations around the town of al-Qaim, cordoning it off for several days at one point as they arrested dozens of young men. =========+========= FEEDBACK? http://nativenewsonline.org/Guestbook/guestbook.cgi WANT TO TALK ABOUT IT? [EMAIL PROTECTED] Escribe archives http://escribe.com/culture/native_news/ Reprinted under the Fair Use http://nativenewsonline.org/fairuse.htm =========+========= Tsonkwadiyonrat (We are ONE Spirit) Native News Online a Service of Barefoot Connection FREE LEONARD PELTIER!! "YOU ~ARE~ THE MESSAGE" Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Nat-International/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
