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U.S. Helicopters Fire At Iraqi Wedding, Kill Over 40
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Many of the dead were children
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BAGHDAD,
May 20 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) - U.S. helicopters killed
more than 40 people, including several children, during a wedding
party in western Iraq on Wednesday, May 19, Iraqi officials and
eyewitnesses said.
A
senior Iraqi police officer told the Associated Press that a
helicopter fired at the party in Makr al-Deeb, a remote village close
to the town of al-Qaim near the Syrian borders, killing between 42 and
45 people.
Lieutenant
Colonel Ziyad al-Jbouri, the deputy police chief for Ramadi, 80 miles
west of Baghdad, told the American news agency that the dead included
15 children and 10 women.
"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, an Iraqi man filmed in an AP
video.
Local
farmer Mortada Hamid, 35, said he was in his house, 600 meters (yards)
from the strike, when the U.S. helicopters opened fire as wedding
revelers were firing their guns in the air in a traditional
celebratory manner.
"More
than 40 people were killed. Bodies were everywhere, most of them women
and children," he told Agence France-Presse (AFP) by telephone.
Commenting
on the reports, U.S. officials said Thursday, May 20, that more than
40 people were killed in the U.S. raid, reported AFP.
"At
3:00 am Wednesday coalition forces carried out a military operation on
a house suspected of sheltering foreign fighters ... A helicopter
fired on the house, killing 41 people," an official told
reporters.
"During
the operation, the coalition forces came under hostile fire, and
returned fire," Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt said in an earlier
statement issued in Baghdad.
Scattered
Bodies
Arab
news televisions al-Arabiya and al-Jazeera aired images of
blanket-shrouded bodies loaded on trucks.
They
quoted witnesses as confirming most of the fatalities were women and
children.
Men
were seen carrying 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, reported the Guardian.
Other
bodies, laid on the ground in a line, had clearly suffered horrific
injuries, said the British daily.
Damaging
The
killings are certain to further damage the U.S. military's battered
reputation in Iraq, the Guardian said.
The
U.S. is already reeling from its much-criticized offensive in Fallujah
last month, which claimed hundreds of Iraqi
lives ,
and now the scandal of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib prison.
The
attack had the hallmarks of a similar
incident in Afghanistan two years ago in which a U.S. jet fighter fired at a wedding party 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.
A
U.S. military investigation had blamed the Afghanistan deaths on
people on the ground.
World
Outcry
The
attack on the Iraq wedding had drawn an international outcry along
with the fury among Iraqis seeking an end to a more than one-year
occupation of their oil-rich country.
The
International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) condemned Thursday an
"excessive" use of force by the U.S. military after the
attack.
"The
excessive use of force violates international human rights," the
ICRC spokeswoman in Baghdad, Nada Dumani, told AFP.
"Even
if (you came under) fire, there are rules of proportion in retaliation
and the absolute need to prevent civilian casualties," she added.
Turkey,
a close U.S. ally, also said on Thursday that operations targeting
Iraqi and Palestinian civilians have escalated to the point of
"state terror".
"The
latest developments in the Middle East, both in Rafah and in Iraq,
show how disastrous the trend has become with respect to human rights
and humanity," Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan told reporters
before flying to Romania.
"This
is unforgivable... It must be known that the bombs have come to hit
peace," Erdogan said.
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