THE BODIES OF 11 FAMILY MEMBERS KILLED EXECUTION STYLE IN TIKRIT LIE IN FRONT OF THE TOWN’S MORGUE.
It is sometimes difficult to wade through media reports of the war and try and ascertain what is true and what isn’t. That’s why we should be very careful in evaluating this story that appeared in The Daily Star, one of the more respected news organs in the Middle East:
Eleven members of an Iraqi family, including five children, were killed in a U.S. raid on Wednesday, police and witnesses said. The U.S. military said two women and a child died during the bid to seize an Al-Qaeda militant from a house. A senior Iraqi police officer said autopsies on the bodies showed each had been shot in the head.[...]
Associated Press photographs showed the bodies of two men, five children and four other covered figures arriving at Tikrit General Hospital accompanied by grief-stricken relatives.
The U.S. military said in a statement its troops had attacked a house in Ishaqi, the town 100 kilometers north of Baghdad, to capture a “foreign fighter facilitator for the Al-Qaeda in Iraq network.”
“There was one enemy killed. Two women and one child were also killed in the firefight. The building … [was] destroyed,” the military said, adding the Al-Qaeda suspect had been captured and was being questioned.
Major Ali Ahmad of the Iraqi police said U.S. forces had landed on the roof of the house in the early hours and shot the 11 occupants, including the five children. “After they left the house they blew it up,” he said.
Another policeman, Colonel Farouk Hussein, said autopsies had been carried out at Tikrit hospital and found that “all the victims had gunshot wounds to the head.”
The bodies, their hands bound, had been dumped in one room before the house was destroyed, Hussein said. Police had found spent American-issue cartridges in the rubble.
Three things to keep in mind:
1. We could be talking about two different incidents here which would explain the discrepancy in stories between the US military and Iraqi police.
2. The story could be a plant. It is not unknown for media outlets like The Daily Star or Al Jazeera to receive propaganda stories planted by al Qaeda that later turn out to be false.
3. Tikrit is the hometown of Saddam Hussein. It would not be beyond imagining for Saddam sympathizers to fabricate this story (or embellish it) in order to put the Americans in the worst possible light.
If this story has any truth to it, look for the left to once again invoke the specter of Viet Nam by comparing the massacre of the family to the My Lai atrocity. My Lai was an unspeakable barbarity carried out by American soldiers who killed 300 men, women, and children after being ordered to by superior officers. And while the death of 11 family members would be an atrocity that would require swift investigation and punishment, the story itself just doesn’t ring true.
In the end, the fact that it happened in Saddam’s birthplace and his clan’s stronghold makes me very wary of believing all the details put out by the town “investigators.” That said, I hope the military looks into the story if only to debunk it.
UPDATE
The Associated Press is reporting the story but with decidedly different details:
Police Capt. Laith Mohammed, in nearby Samarra, said American warplanes and armor flattened the house and killed the 11 people inside.An AP reporter in the area said the roof collapsed. Eleven bodies, wrapped in blankets, were taken to the Tikrit General Hospital, relatives said.
Associated Press photographs showed the bodies of two men, five children and four other covered figures at the hospital accompanied by grieving relatives. The victims were covered in dust and bits of rubble.
Riyadh Majid, who said he was the nephew of the killed head of the family—Faez Khalaf—told AP that U.S. forces landed in helicopters and raided the home. Khalaf’s brother, Ahmed, said nine dead were residents of the house and two were visitors.
“The killed family was not part of the resistance, they were women and children,” Ahmed Khalaf said. “The Americans have promised us a better life, but we get only death.”
The U.S. military said it was targeting and captured an individual suspected of supporting foreign fighters for the al-Qaida in Iraq terrorist network.
“Troops were engaged by enemy fire as they approached the building,” said Tech. Sgt. Stacy Simon. “Coalition forces returned fire utilizing both air and ground assets.”
No mention of family members being shot in the back of the head or their hands being bound behind them. There is also no reports of the house being blown up only that the “roof collapsed.”
The incident does sound like a tragic repeat of other actions where insurgents or terrorists take cover in houses either sympathetic to them or where they simply barge in and use for shelter, guns being a fairly persuasive argument that they should be invited to stay. And as we’ve also seen in urban warfare, when someone is shooting at you, it becomes an impossibility to be very selective about targets.
The fact that the military evidently got the terrorist and are questioning him lends a little more credence to the story being told by CENCOM. Let us now see how big a deal this becomes on the left over the next 24 hours.
9:25 am
Another family liberated.
Mission Accomplished.
9:27 am
Richard:
As usual, your contribution to the discussion is meaningless, vapid, unoriginal, and loony.
Thanks for being so consistent…
10:36 am
As someone who has been to Iraq and works in the intelligence community, I can honestly say it’s impossible to make a definitive judgment on a case like this based on a couple of press reports. Typically, there are so many factors and facts that reporters publishing an initial story don’t have access to that they are often wrong. Unfortunately, it’s the original story that usually has the most staying power – the story that is most often incorrect or missing key facts.
That said, here is my analysis based on the information you’ve presented here. First off, there is no way that Americans executed these people. The original story says that autopsies showed that each had been shot in the head. That is obviously false based on the picture – the children there have no gunshot wounds in the head, and you don’t need an autopsy to determine that. I find it very unlikely autopsies were even performed given the number of people killed daily there. There is no need for autopsies when people have obviously been shot or executed, or the circumstances’ surrounding their death is known.
Second, it’s entirely possible that the roof of the building did collapse as a result of American actions. The roofs for many buildings, especially in the slum areas of Iraq, are often flimsy sheet metal or are under engineered. A hovering helicopter and/or armored troops fast-roping onto the roof certainly could have caused it to collapse. Obviously ordnance and fire on the house could have caused this as well.
To me this looks like a case where the family was hiding a suspected insurgent, either voluntarily or against their will. When troops came to raid the place, the insurgent probably started shooting. With our inherent right of self-defense, we probably shot back not knowing about the children in the building. Tragedies like this are all too common in this kind of warfare. Insurgents who use the local populace for support inevitably bring death to that populace, despite our best efforts to avoid killing civilians. The blame for the children’s deaths lay at the hands of the insurgent, who, knowing he was a target, surrounded himself with innocents. Alternatively, the head of the family invited the insurgent into his family’s midst – in that case, he is to blame.
It’s certainly possible the US forces made mistakes or did something they shouldn’t have done. Despite our best intentions our military is not perfect and this kind of war punishes mistakes in very brutal and tragic ways.
10:42 am
Andrew:
I appreciate your expert analysis. I’ve seen this sort of thing from The Star and al Jazeera before – which is why I was cautious about accepting the report at face value.
6:04 pm
An obvious possibility is that the one suspected terrorist in the house in a Waco-style blaze of glory shoots all the others in the head and then kills himself.