Military defends Iraq killings
WASHINGTON – Senior U.S. Defense Department officials pushed back on Friday against the latest accusations of wrongdoing, denying accounts that American soldiers deliberately had killed civilians in a March raid but acknowledging that more civilians might have died than the military first reported.
Iraqi police and other witnesses had claimed that U.S. forces had killed as many as 13 civilians in the hamlet of Ishaqi, near the Iraqi city of Balad, tying up some and shooting them in the head. Video obtained by the British Broadcasting Corp. and Associated Press showed some bodies of victims, including several children, who apparently had been killed by gunshot wounds or shrapnel.
The U.S. military initially reported there were only four people, including one insurgent and three civilians, killed in the Ishaqi raid. But Friday, they acknowledged that eight other noncombatants had been killed, calling the additional casualties “collateral deaths.”
It is not clear when the inquiry turned up the other civilian deaths and a military spokesman in Baghdad, the Iraqi capital, said the “timetable of the investigation is not up for discussion.”
The new questions about the military’s account came in the wake of other allegations of misconduct by U.S. troops. In one, a squad of Marines in November apparently killed two dozen unarmed Iraqi civilians in Haditha, an incident under investigation both for the soldiers’ actions as well as the way in which it was handled by the Marine Corps, which has been accused of a cover-up.
In another incident, a group of Marines could face murder charges in the death of a civilian in Hamandiya in April and other charges for possibly attempting to cover up the killing.
The developments have prompted concern within the military that the public will see a pattern of excessive violence, lack of discipline and criminal acts.
Trying to head off another controversy, military officials vehemently denied that the incident at Ishaqi bore any relationship to Haditha.
“Nothing suggests anything happened close to Haditha,” a senior Defense official said.
The military acknowledges that something went wrong in Haditha, both in the initial killings and the failure to quickly investigate what happened. But military officials believe Haditha was an aberration, and they took pains on Friday to show they had thoroughly investigated the Ishaqi raid.
Regarding the Ishaqi incident, a senior Pentagon official said Friday that the military’s investigation – which began soon after the incident – showed that the civilians were killed in a crossfire between American forces and members of terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s organization.
In a written statement, Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV said that the raid was launched against a building where a Kuwaiti-born al-Qaida cell leader, Ahmad Abdallah Muhammed Na’is Al-Utaybi, and a bomb maker, Uday Faris al-Tawafi, were located.
The raid killed Al-Utaybi, the cell leader who was also called Hamza, and the American troops captured al-Tawafi, the bomb maker who was known as Abu Ahmed, Caldwell said.
In addition to Al-Utaybi’s body, the attack force found the bodies of two women and a child at the scene of the collapsed building.
The investigation that followed concluded that nine additional noncombatants were killed, said a military official in Iraq. Those bodies apparently were hidden by the debris of the collapsed building and the tactical team had not realized that they were killed in the fighting, another official said.