Another wedding incident

[The Hierophant]

Originally posted by Timber Loftis: Be reasonable, Melusine. If the attacks did occur at that hour (a fact still in question according to CNN) then he has a fair point.

which is?

[skywalker]

'US soldiers started to shoot us, one by one'

Survivors describe wedding massacre as generals refuse to apologise

Rory McCarthy in Ramadi
Friday May 21, 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?"

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."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story...221658,00.html

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

Latest I've seen about the story.

Mark

[johnny]

Originally posted by Timber Loftis: Be reasonable, Melusine. If the attacks did occur at that hour (a fact still in question according to CNN) then he has a fair point.

Timber, where i come from, 3 AM is a normal time for a party to be in full swing. And i'm not sure here, but i believe that in the Arab world, parties can last for days in a row, without the participants getting any sleep.

So no, he doesn't have any point at all.

[Timber Loftis]

That's the most schizophrenic news article I've read in a long time. It's like its telling me two separate stories at once. Still waiting for the facts.

And, to cut through the BS, Johnny, yes people party at 3 AM. However, my point is that it would be a *factor* among many others in the military making a determination that a gathering of people was a military/terrorist operation.

[Azred]

One the one hand, since I wasn't there I don't know whether or not it was a legitimate party or a simple celebration. I'll have to wait for even more reports to come out.

On the second hand, this is a relatively minor incident and will fall back under the news radar in about a week, at which time the next new crisis will capture everyone's attention.

On the third hand, if you are stupid enough to fire automatic weapons into the air in a region that has recently seen war, then you have no right to complain if you subsequently get shot. [img]graemlins/doh.gif[/img]

Skunk, in most American cities fireworks are illegal--to light them will get you fined anywhere from $500 to $2000.

[Donut]

Originally posted by Azred: On the second hand, this is a relatively minor incident and will fall back under the news radar in about a week, at which time the next new crisis will capture everyone's attention.

"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 suppose the definition on what constitutes a "minor incident" is very dependent on where you live in the world.

[Azred]

Not really. Do you pay much attention to stories of murder or rape in the city in which you live? Or do you you simply accept those as part of modern life, finish your lunch, and go back to work as if nothing happened?

By "minor incident", I mean that this story--no matter how it plays out--will not be a headline story for more than a week. Something else will happen to knock this story down to page 10 of major newspapers, and then it will be simply something that happened back in May.

[Timber Loftis]

Azred, you've got too many hands.

And fireworks are awesome -- kids lost a lot of their power to get back at the mean old people in their neighborhood when they quit making M-80s. Of course, I've little cause to lament since during the summer months I can walk a few short blocks to watch the fireworks over Lake Michigan every Wed. and Sat. night. But, having little cause to bitch has never stopped me before. [img]graemlins/heee.gif[/img]

Ooops, I'm way [img]graemlins/offtopic.gif[/img]

Still waiting for the facts. I hope our military did not do this. I hope that if it did, it was justified (e.g. the families at the wedding were terrorists, or some other reason) or was a damned reasonable mistake to make. None of which brings back the dead, of course.

[Dreamer128]

Includes yet another version of events.
One incident. Forty dead. Two stories. What really happened?

By Justin Huggler in Baghdad
21 May 2004

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

General Kimmitt said: "We sent a ground force in to the location. They were shot at. We returned fire."

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.

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.

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?"

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.

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.

(Source: http://news.independent.co.uk )

[ 05-21-2004, 12:14 PM: Message edited by: Dreamer128 ]

[Azred]

Naturally, one would expect Iraqi people who are questioned about the event to say whatever needs to be said to make sure that the story is that of an innocent wedding party that gets blown to smithereens by the mean ol' American forces. Likewise, one would expect American military personnel to stick to the story of "troops under fire".

It still all boils down to a lack of common sense. If, indeed, it was a wedding party, then someone should have had the good sense not to fire weapons when potentially trigger-happy foreign troops might be nearby.

Originally posted by Timber Loftis: Azred, you've got too many hands.

I know that there is a joke incorporating Belle in there somewhere, but the remaining dregs of my sense of decency prevent me from saying it. [img]graemlins/petard.gif[/img]