Wedding
Party Massacre
By Rory McCarthy
20 May, 2004
The
Guardian
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.