US under fire for use of firepower

By RAYMOND WHITAKER and JUSTIN HUGGLER in Baghdad

Amid the pictures from Iraq last week were images worse than those of the torture of detainees in Abu Ghraib prison.

These show chunks of flesh and hanks of women's hair scattered across a scene of devastation. Among the few recognisable objects are musical instruments.

This is the scene of an incident that has divided Iraqis from their occupiers like few others and it highlighted an issue more significant, yet far less discussed, than mistreatment in prisons: the degree to which indiscriminate use of American firepower has made enemies of the Iraqi population.

According to independent estimates, about 11,500 Iraqi civilians have been killed since the start of the war in March last year.

The footage of flesh, hair and musical instruments was filmed by a video crew at what local people say was a wedding party attacked without warning by the Americans.

The instruments belonged to the band of Hussein Ali, one of Iraq's most famous wedding singers.

Despite this evidence - and earlier pictures filmed by al-Arabiya television, showing two dead babies wrapped in a blanket, and a headless child next to the body of his or her mother - American commanders continue to insist that their strike, on a remote village in the desert close to the Syrian border, was against foreign fighters crossing into Iraq.

"These were more than two dozen military-age males," scoffed Major-General James Mattis, commander of the US 1st Marine Division. "Let's not be naive."

What about the video footage?

Mattis said he had not seen it, but added: "Bad things happen in wars. I don't have to apologise for the conduct of my men."

Although an investigation has been promised, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Richard Myers, said in Washington: "We feel at this point very confident that this was a legitimate target, probably foreign fighters."

Not only that: the Americans are now hinting that the "foreign fighters" could be linked to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, an Islamist militant leader and ally of Osama bin Laden, and who is accused of personally beheading the American hostage Nick Berg.

More telling was the reaction of the occupation authorities to the damaging video footage. US officials demanded al-Arabiya give them the name of the cameraman who shot the pictures. Al-Arabiya refused.

As the Abu Ghraib scandal has proved, shocking images can lead to investigations not only in Iraq but elsewhere, and cause trouble not only for the military but for the CIA and the White House as well.

Until they saw the pictures, Americans were unaware of what was happening to Iraqis in custody. They also remain ignorant of the reasons for the mounting toll of civilian deaths since the invasion last year.

Ever since the occupation began, there have been stories of American soldiers who were attacked by insurgents on the streets of Iraqi cities and reacted by spraying the entire area with wild, indiscriminate gunfire, killing and maiming innocent Iraqi bystanders.

Before he was jailed for a year last week for failing to return from leave, another soldier who served in Iraq, Sergeant Camilo Mejia, said a friend of his, a sniper, had shot a child about 10 years old who was carrying an automatic weapon. "He realised it was a kid," said Mejia. "The kid tried to get up. He shot him again." The child died.

Few images exist of such incidents, not least because journalists seeking to record them have ended up dead themselves.

Thanks to the persistence of one or two news organisations that have lost employees in Iraq, these deaths are among the few to have been independently investigated.

After cameraman, Mazen Dana, became the second Reuters employee to be killed, the agency hired a security company and carried out an inquiry, which found few differences of fact with the military investigation, but which differed radically in its conclusions.

The soldier who shot Dana claimed he had made "sudden movements" which made him think the cameraman was about to fire a rocket-propelled grenade, that he was blinded by the sun at the time, and that he could not distinguish between an RPG and a television camera at a distance of 75m.

Despite pages of evidence proving the sun was not in the position claimed, and photographs demonstrating the visible difference at 75m between a camera and a large weapon, the US military is sticking to its finding that the journalist's death was "justified based on the information available ... at the time".

If an organisation with the clout of Reuters cannot get the Pentagon to admit an error, the the survivors of last week's slaughtered wedding party have even less chance.

But the incident illustrates several of the concerns expressed about the operations undertaken by US forces in Iraq, including their ignorance of Iraqi culture, their isolation from local people and their over-dependence on firepower.

"How many people go to the middle of the desert 10 miles from the Syrian border to hold a wedding?" demanded Mattis.

The answer is plenty, if you come from a clan of livestock herders and that is where you have lived all your life. The clan straddles the Syrian border; even distant relatives would be expected to turn up from there, as well as the far corners of Iraq.

Brigadier-General Mark Kimmitt, the US military spokesman in Iraq, said US forces found guns, Syrian passports and a satellite phone at the scene of the fighting. None of that was surprising, either: even in the cities, every house has a weapon.

In a village 120km from the nearest town they are even more necessary, both to protect against bandits and to shield flocks from wild animals. With no telephone lines and no mobile coverage, it is not unusual for such places to have a satellite phone as well.

- INDEPENDENT

Herald Feature: Iraq