- 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."
-
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- Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited
2004
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