Atrocity Story

Every war produces atrocities. Usually the civilians who sent the soldiers to fight don't believe the stories. I know I didn't believe some of the stories my fellow soldiers brought back from Vietnam about killing women and children. They were true though - these guys had been at My Lai or similar, smaller scale versions.

Here's a candidate from Ishaqi. The US and Iraqi police accounts have some things in common. US Marines went there looking for an al Quaeda member and found him. The al Quaeda suspect was captured and the other people in the house wound up dead. In the Marine's version, a helicopter gunship fired on the house, they went in, found the rest of the people dead and took out the suspect. Neighbors and the US trained Iraqi police (those guys standing up as we stand down), say that the Americans went in, handcuffed everybody, brought the suspect out, shot everybody else, killed all the farm animals, and then called in the gunship to destroy the house.

A translated version of the signed Iraqi police report says:
POLICE REPORT
This is a translation of the Iraqi police report obtained by Knight Ridder, including accounts of events not related to the Ishaqi raid.
In the name of God, the most merciful
This is the morning and afternoon events of 15/3/2006
1. Interior Ministry Operations:
All forces belonging to the Interior Ministry will go on 100 percent alert status starting Wednesday 15/3/2006 until 1000 hours Friday 17/3/2006.
2. Coordination Center of Beji
At 810 gunmen in a white vehicle, duck type (a reference to the local name for a Toyota model) kidnapped the child Mohamed (Badei Khaled) from Samaha school in Beji (map coordinates 617667).
3. Coordination Center of Dujail
At 730 a benzene truck burned near Gassem al Queisy fuel station after one of its tires caught fire. The incident burned the driver (Hamed Abdalilah) and he was transported to the hospital (map coordinates 263519).
4. Coordination Center of Balad
At 230 of 15/3/2006, according to the telegram (report) of the Ishaqi police directorate, 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 5 children, 4 women and 2 men, then they bombed the house, burned three vehicles and killed their animals (map coordinates 098702).
They were:
Turkiya Muhammed Ali, 75 years
Faiza Harat Khalaf, 30 years
Faiz Harat Khalaf, 28 years
Um Ahmad, 23 years
Sumaya Abdulrazak, 22 years
Aziz Khalil Jarmoot, 22 years
Hawra Harat Khalaf, 5 years
Asma Yousef Maruf, 5 years
Osama Yousef Maruf, 3 years
Aisha Harat Khalaf, 3 years
Husam Harat Khalaf, 6 months
(Signed)
Staff Colonel
Fadhil Muhammed Khalaf
Assistant Chief of the Joint Coordination Center
3/16/2006
The Knight-Ridder correspondents reporting the story interviewed some of the locals.
A local police commander, Lt. Col. Farooq Hussain, interviewed by a Knight Ridder special correspondent in Ishaqi, said autopsies at the hospital in Tikrit "revealed that all the victims had bullet shots in the head and all bodies were handcuffed." Efforts to reach hospital spokesmen Sunday were unsuccessful.
Keefe, the U.S. military spokesman, said that he had seen photographs of the victims and had not seen handcuffs, which caused him to doubt the validity of the report.
He said, however, that he has no reason to doubt the body count provided by local police.
The part about killing the animals had an odd resonance for me. The American military historian Brigadier General S.L.A. Marshall's account of D-Day has a story of American soldiers who, after a killing a group of German soldiers in a fierce fire fight, opened the barn and shot every cow, pig, and goose. Similarly, in the Illiad, Odessyus, after a battle, slaughters farm animals in a fit or delusion. Of course killing the women and children wouldn't have shamed a Greek, but doing in the farm animals was a terrible faux pas, and a source of lasting embarassment.

There are those who would invent or exaggerate such stories. Unfortunately, they are sometimes true. From the standpoint of the dead, of course, it hardly matters whether they were executed up close and personal or blasted apart by a John McCain style bomb from the sky.

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