"US Soldiers Started to Shoot Us, One by One"

Rory McCarthy, The Guardian

Survivors describe wedding massacre as generals refuse to apologise

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 apparent 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."

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