March 26, 2006

Iraqis killed by US troops ‘on rampage’

Claims of atrocities by soldiers mount

Hala Jaber and Tony Allen-Mills, New York

THE villagers of Abu Sifa (Isahaqi) near the Iraqi town of Balad had become used to the sound of explosions at night as American forces searched the area for suspected insurgents. But one night two weeks ago Issa Harat Khalaf heard a different sound that chilled him to the bone.

Khalaf, a 33-year-old security officer guarding oil pipelines, saw a US helicopter land near his home. American soldiers stormed out of the Chinook and advanced on a house owned by Khalaf’s brother Fayez, firing as they went.

Khalaf ran from his own house and hid in a nearby grove of trees. He saw the soldiers enter his brother’s home and then heard the sound of women and children screaming.

“Then there was a lot of machinegun fire,” he said last week. After that there was the most frightening sound of all — silence, followed by explosions as the soldiers left the house.

Once the troops were gone, Khalaf and his fellow villagers began a frantic search through the ruins of his brother’s home. Abu Sifa (Isahaqi) was about to join a lengthening list of Iraqi communities claiming to have suffered from American atrocities.

According to Iraqi police, 11 bodies were pulled from the wreckage of the house, among them four women and five children aged between six months and five years. An official police report obtained by a US reporter for Knight Ridder newspapers said: “The American forces gathered the family members in one room and executed 11 people.”

The Abu Sifa (Isahaqi) deaths on March 15 were first reported last weekend on the day that Time magazine published the results of a 10-week investigation into an incident last November when US marines killed 15 civilians in their homes in the western Iraqi town of Haditha.

...In Abu Sifa (Isahaqi) last week, Khalaf’s account was corroborated by a neighbour, Hassan Kurdi Mahassen, who was also woken by the sound of helicopters and saw soldiers entering Fayez’s home after spraying it with such heavy fire that walls crumbled.

Mahassen said that once the soldiers had left — after apparently dropping several grenades that caused part of the house to collapse — villagers searched under the rubble “and found them all buried in one room”.

“Women and even the children were blindfolded and their hands bound. Some of their faces were totally disfigured. A lot of blood was on the floors and the walls.”

Khalaf said he had found the body of his mother Turkiya with her face unrecognisable. “She had been shot with a dumdum bullet,” he claimed.

Read rest of article here.

Published: 26 March 2006

Did American Marines murder 23 Iraqi civilians?

US military investigators are examining allegations that Marines shot unarmed Iraqis, then claimed they were "enemy fighters", The Independent on Sunday has learned. In the same incident, eyewitnesses say, one man bled to death over a period of hours as soldiers ignored his pleas for help.

American military officials in Iraq have already admitted that 15 civilians who died in the incident in the western town of Haditha last November were killed by Marines, and not by a roadside bomb, as had previously been claimed. The only victim of the remotely triggered bomb, it is now conceded, was a 20-year-old Marine, Lance-Corporal Miguel Terrazas, from El Paso, Texas.

An inquiry has been launched by the US Navy's Criminal Investigation Service after the military was presented with evidence that the 15 civilians, including seven women and three children still in their nightclothes, had been killed in their homes in the wake of the bombing. If it is proved that they died in a rampage by the Marines, and not as a result of "collateral damage", it would rank as the worst case of deliberate killing of Iraqi civilians by US armed forces since the invasion three years ago.

The military still insists that eight men who also died on 19 November were insurgents who opened fire on a Marines patrol after the bomb explosion. One military spokeswoman said the civilian deaths were their fault, because they "placed noncombatants in the line of fire as the Marines responded to defend themselves". But numerous witnesses say the only shooting was by the Marines, and that the only difference between these victims and the rest were that they were young men who could be depicted as insurgents. Despite claims of a fierce firefight after the explosion, military officials say two AK-47 rifles were the only weapons recovered.

Four of the young men who died were students on their way to college. They were in a car which was near the Marines' convoy when the bomb went off. According to the soldiers' statements to investigators, they told the youths to leave the car and lie face down in the road. Instead they ran, and were shot down. All this time, the Marines said, they were under fire from nearby houses.

The IoS understands, however, that local people have contradicted this account in almost every detail. According to their statements, the soldiers were not under fire when they approached the car. Rather than order the occupants to leave the vehicle and lie down, they simply dragged them out and shot them. While investigators seek to determine the truth of the incident, the military has admitted no weapons were found in the vehicle.

Read rest of article here.

Tuesday March 21, 2006

Iraqi police claim US troops executed family

· Women and children shot in raid, says official report
· Marines accused after 15 died in separate incident

Julian Borger in Washington

Iraqi police have accused American soldiers of executing 11 Iraqi civilians, including four children and a six-month-old baby, in a raid on Wednesday near the city of Balad, it was reported yesterday.

The allegations are contained in an Iraqi police report on the killings, obtained and published by the Knight Ridder news agency. The report emerged at a time when a US navy criminal investigation is under way into a previous incident, in November, in which marines are accused of killing 15 Iraqi civilians in Haditha in reprisal for a bomb attack on a US patrol.

Last week's incident in the village of Abu Sifa, near Balad, stand out because of the seriousness of the accusations and the fact that they appear on an official police report signed by Iraqi officers.

After listing other incidents in the area, the report for March 15 states: "American forces used helicopters to drop troops on the house of Faiz Harat Khalaf situated in the Abu Sifa village of the Ishaqi district. The American forces gathered the family members in one room and executed 11 people, including five children, four women and two men, then they bombed the house, burned three vehicles and killed their animals." Among victims the report lists two five-year-old children, two three-year-olds and a six-month-old baby.

The US military say that the deaths occurred when US troops raided a house in pursuit of an al-Qaida suspect and that only four people were killed. Major Tim Keefe, a US military spokesman in Baghdad said: "A battle damage assessment, the initial reports, said that what they saw were four people killed - a woman and two children and an enemy - and they detained an enemy."

Brigadier General Issa al-Juboori, who runs the joint coordination centre in Tikrit, stood by the report and said he knew the police officer running the investigation. "He's a dedicated policeman, and a good cop," Gen Juboori told Knight Ridder. "I trust him."

Both accounts of the incident agree there was a firefight in the early hours of the morning when US troops raided a house which an al-Qaida suspect was suspected to be visiting. The American account said the house collapsed as a result of the firefight, killing two women, a child, and a man believed to have al-Qaida links. The suspect survived and was captured. But the Iraqi police report suggests that the killings took place when the house was still standing. A local police commander, Lieutenant Colonel Farooq Hussain, said hospital autopsies "revealed that all the victims had bullet shots in the head and all bodies were handcuffed".

Read rest of article here.

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Empire Burlesque - High Crimes and Low Comedy in the Bush Imperium

by Chris Floyd

The book tells the tale in real-time: a view from the ground as it was happening, before the inevitable spin, revisionist history and public amnesia set in. It draws on the controversial weekly column he writes for The Moscow Times, the English-daily in Russia, and its sister paper, The St Petersburg Times. It also includes columns written for the leading American political journal, CounterPunch, as well as occasional pieces for The Ecologist in the UK, where he is a regular contributor, and The Nation, the Christian Science Monitor, Columbia Journalism Review and many others.

Woven together with new material to provide context and narrative continuity, the columns paint what he believes is a unique portrait of a vitally important historical process: the degradation of the American Republic, beginning here with the grim farce of Bush's appointment in the 2000 election and ending with the latest stories of atrocity, mayhem and fatal incompetence in Iraq. Although the subject matter is often grim, the pieces are written in vibrant prose, combining the urgency of journalism with an essayist's feel for language, mixing humour, satire, outrage and passion.

Yet the book is not simply a jeremiad of partisan opinionating. It is rigorously fact-based, based on reputable, mainstream sources – although it uses the information gleaned from these sources to cut through the conventional wisdom and obfuscation, which they themselves so often convey. There is also a good deal of historical background to provide a deeper understanding of the whirlwind of current events.

Chris Floyd is an American journalist. He writes the weekly Global Eye political column for The Moscow Times and St. Petersburg Times.

His work also appears in The Ecologist, The Nation, CounterPunch, Christian Science Monitor, Bergen Record, Columbia Journalism Review and elsewhere around the world. He is the author of the book, Empire Burlesque: The Secret History of the Bush Regime. His columns are featured each week on Bush Watch.

He has been a writer and editor for more than 20 years, working in the United States, Great Britain and Russia for various newspapers, magazines, the U.S. government and Oxford University.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 335 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: V.O.F. Expathos - Richard Kastelein (September 2005)
· Product Number: 26201529

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