The
Horrific Details Of
The Wedding Party Massacre
By Rory McCarthy
in Ramadi
21May, 2004
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?"
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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."