US disputes 40 killed Iraqis were wedding party

1.00pm

BAGHDAD - The US army said on Thursday it killed around 40 people in an attack on suspected foreign fighters in Iraq near the Syrian border, but disputed reports that the victims were members of a wedding party.

Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, deputy director of operations for the US military in Iraq, told Reuters the attack early on Wednesday was within the military's rules of engagement.

"At 0300 (11pm NZT Wednesday) we conducted an operation about 85km southwest of al-Qaim...against suspected foreign fighters in a safe house," Kimmitt said. "We took ground fire and we returned fire."

Kimmitt said there were no indications that the victims of the attack were part of a wedding party. He said a large amount of money, Syrian passports and satellite communications equipment had been found at the site after the attack.

But Dubai-based Al Arabiya television, quoting eyewitnesses, said the raid on the village of Makr al-Deeb before dawn had targeted people celebrating a wedding and had killed at least 41 civilians.

"We received about 40 martyrs today, mainly women and children below the age of 12," Hamdy al-Lousy, the director of Qaim hospital, told Al Arabiya. "We also have 11 people wounded, most of them in critical condition."

Arabiya showed pictures of several shrouded bodies lined up on a dirt road. Men were shown digging graves and lowering bodies, one of a child, into the pits while relatives wept.

"The US planes dropped more than 100 bombs on us," an unidentified man who said he was from the village said on Al Arabiya. "They hit two homes where the wedding was being held and then they levelled the whole village. No bullets were fired by us, nothing was happening," he added.

Guests and relatives at Arab weddings often fire guns in the air in jubilation.

The United States, which is facing a Shi'ite and Sunni Muslim insurgency in Iraq, says foreign fighters are entering Iraq from Syria.

It would not be the first time US forces have mistakenly fired on a wedding party. In 2002, 48 civilians were killed in a US air strike on a wedding party in Afghanistan. That was believed to have been caused when US forces mistook wedding guests firing in the air in celebration for hostile fire.

There were immediate suspicions the same thing had happened in Iraq. Iraqis routinely fire in the air at celebrations - just a few nights ago, Baghdad echoed to gunfire when the Iraqi football team beat Saudi Arabia.

Several wedding guests interviewed on the videotape obtained by the Assoicated Press said there had been firing in the air before the attack.

But Dr Salah al-Ani, a doctor at Ramadi hospital, claimed that American soldiers had visited the village to find out what the shooting was, and that the helicopter fired after they left.

It was not clear how Dr Ani knew this if the incident took place near the border, along way from Ramadi - although the injured may have been brought to Ramadi hospital.

Anbar province, a vast area of largely empty desert in western Iraq, is home to some of the fiercest resistance to the US occupation. The province's most famous city is Falluja, where four contractors were lynched in March, prompting a heavy-handed US repsonse in which hundreds of civilians are believed to have died.

Most of the Sunni tribes in Anbar are already implacably opposed to the occupation, and heavily involved in the insurgency. But news of the reported attack on the wedding party will spread like wildfire across Iraq, igniting new fury among Iraqis who are already incensed by the photographs of naked Iraqi prisoners being abused by American soldiers at Abu Ghraib jail.

US commanders claim foreign fighters are entering Iraq via the Syrian border, and it is possible the helicopter crew mistakenly thought the gunfire came from foreign fighters. If the reports of more than 40 dead wedding guests are true, it will be a costly mistake for the US.

Although some foreign mujahedin have crossed into Iraq, and are mounting attacks against US forces, the evidence that has emerged so far has not indicated that they are here in the large numbers claimed by the US.

There have been a string of disastrous blunders and misjudgements by the US in Iraq.

Their April assault on Falluja transformed a local insurgency into a resistance movement that's fighters are revered as national heroes across Iraq. Then the US found it could not overwhelm Falluja without inflicting horrific civilian casualties, and brokered a ceasefire under which a former general under Saddam Hussein took security control in the city -- which looked like a humiliating defeat for the Americans to many Iraqis.

And, as the scandal over the Abu Ghraib photographs rolls on, US forces seem to be getting bogged down in a potentially even more damaging assault on Shia militiamen in the holy cities of Najaf and Karbala.

US forces have vowed to kill or capture the radical Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, who is leading a Shia uprising across southern Iraq, and crush his Mehdi Army militia. But in recent weeks they have been fighting ever more ferocious battles with the Mehdi Army in and around Najaf and Karbala.

The two holiest Shia shrines have already been damaged in the fighting, risking a fearsome Shia backlash. American tanks were yesterday reported to be advancing within 50 metres of the Imam Hussein shrine in Karbala, and American war planes had launched air strikes on the outskirts of the city.

- REUTERS and INDEPENDENT


Herald Feature: Iraq