US Troops Fire on Falluja Crowd,
Iraqis Say 2 Dead
By Edmund Blair
Reuters
30 April, 2003
U.S. troops opened fire on Wednesday for the second time this week on an angry crowd in the Iraqi town of Falluja, near Baghdad.
A local hospital official said two men had been killed in the incident. Soldiers said they fired only after being shot at.
"The number of killed was two. They were hit in the head," said Ahmed al-Taha, a senior official at the main hospital in Falluja, 30 miles west of Baghdad.
He put their ages between the late 20s and early 30s and said they had been hit by bullets or shrapnel. At least eight people were being treated for wounds, he added.
The incident, which came as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld flew in for a postwar visit to Baghdad, may fuel Iraqi resentment at the U.S. presence just three weeks after troops were welcomed as liberators for overthrowing Saddam Hussein.
Major Michael Marti of the U.S. 82nd Airborne Division told Reuters that soldiers traveling in a vehicle convoy had opened fire only after shots were fired at them from a crowd of people who had begun the violence by throwing stones.
The crowd had been protesting outside the main U.S. command post in the town about the killing of at least 13 Iraqis in the town on Monday night. The post is in the former headquarters of Saddam Hussein's Baath party, next to the mayor's office.
People in the crowd threw stones at the convoy, Marti said: "Then fire came from the crowd, directed at the convoy. It was at that point that they returned fire...It was well-aimed fire."
He said soldiers counted "potentially" two injured Iraqis.
Some residents said they thought up to four people might have been killed and said the demonstrators had been unarmed.
A new protest followed the shooting, with a crowd hurling abuse at the Americans from the street outside the command post.
MONDAY BLOODSHED
U.S. commanders said its soldiers opened fire in Falluja on Monday night only after coming under attack by around 25 armed Iraqis among a crowd of hundreds of protesters. Many locals insisted the protesters, about 200 of them, had not been armed.
At U.S. Central Command headquarters in Qatar, a spokesman said details of Wednesday's shooting were not yet clear.
"We are still looking into this incident to try and be able to confirm exactly what happened on Wednesday in Falluja, but there have been no known cases of intentional injury to unarmed Iraqis," Captain Stewart Upton said.
"Coalition members never target civilians. We go to painstaking lengths to avoid injuring civilians and I believe that has been proven by our actions in this conflict...and the people of Iraq know it as well."
On Monday night, about 100 men of the 82nd Airborne, based in a local school and braced for attacks from loyalists on what was Saddam's 66th birthday, came under rifle fire from the crowd, according to the soldiers' own accounts.
They returned fire into the darkened street with rifles and heavy machineguns, judging by residents' accounts and damage to nearby buildings. At least 13 Iraqis died and over 70 were hurt, the director of the local hospital said.