Iraqis Say U.S. Attacked Wedding Party (US Miltary denies the report )

As survivors tell it, the wedding party was in full swing. The band was playing tribal music and the guests had just finished eating dinner when, at about 9 p.m., they heard the roar of U.S. warplanes. Fearing trouble, the revelers ended the festivities and went to bed.

"Mothers died with their children in their arms," said Madhi Nawaf, who survived the attack Wednesday in Mogr el-Deeb on the Syrian border. Up to 45 people died - mostly women and children from the Bou Fahad tribe.

"One of them was my daughter," Nawaf told The Associated Press. "I found her a few steps from the house, her 2-year-old son Raad in her arms. Her 1-year-old son, Raed, was lying nearby, missing his head."

In Baghdad, Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, coalition deputy chief of operations, said Thursday the U.S. military would investigate after Iraqi officials reported the survivors' story.

However, Kimmitt said the military maintains the target was a safehouse for infiltrators slipping across the border to fight coalition soldiers in Iraq.

Kimmitt said several shotguns, handguns, Kalashnikov rifles and machine guns were found at the site. And he said soldiers also found jewelry and vehicles that indicated the people were not wandering Bedouin but "town dwellers."

"Ten miles from the Syrian border and 80 miles from the nearest city and a wedding party? Don't be naive," Marine Maj. Gen. James N. Mattis told reporters in Fallujah. "Plus, they had 30 males of military age with them. How many people go to the middle of the desert to have a wedding party?"

But members of the Bou Fahad tribe say they consider the border area part of their territory and follow their goats, sheep and cattle there to graze. They leave spacious homes in Ramadi and roam the desert, as far as 250 miles to the west, in the springtime.

Smuggling livestock into Syria is also part of a herdsman's life - although no one in the tribe admitted to that.

Weddings are often marked in Iraq with celebratory gunfire. However, survivors insisted no weapons were fired Wednesday, despite speculation by Iraqi officials that this drew a mistaken American attack.

"They're lying," Nawaf said. "They have to show us evidence that we fired a shot or were hiding foreign fighters. Where are the foreign fighters then? Why kill and dismember innocent children?"

Nawaf and more than a dozen men from the Bou Fahad tribe transported the dead to Ramadi, capital of Anbar province, which includes Mogr el-Deeb. Twenty-eight graves were dug in the tribe's cemetery outside Ramadi, each containing one to three bodies. A wake was held Thursday at a home in Ramadi.

Nawaf's brother, Taleb, lost his wife, Amal, and two daughters, 2-year-old Anoud and 1-year-old Kholood. His wife's body was found clutching the two children, survivors said.

All the men interviewed insisted there were no foreign fighters in Mogr el-Deeb, a desolate area popular with smugglers. The U.S. military suspects militants cross the area from Syria to fight the Americans, and it is under constant surveillance by American forces.

"We would know if any outsider comes to our area," said Hamed Abdul-Razaq, another survivor.

Sheik Dahan Haraj, the tribe's chief who was also at the wedding, said that if the Americans suspected terrorists, "why not seal off the area and make sure they were indeed foreign fighters?"

Survivors said they became fearful when they heard aircraft overhead about 9 p.m. Tuesday. Then came military vehicles, which stopped about two miles away from the village and switched off their headlights. The planes were still overhead at 11 p.m.

They decided to end the celebration, and the bride and groom, Azhar Rikad and Rutba Sabah, went into their tent.

About 25 male guests who came from Ramadi for the wedding and five band members from Baghdad stayed in the main tent. All the women went to bed in an adjacent one-story stone house. Many men, including Nawaf, drifted away to their nearby homes.

The first bomb struck the main tent at about 2:45 a.m., the survivors said. Among those who died was Hussein al-Ali, a prominent wedding singer from Baghdad. The second bomb struck the stone house, killing everyone inside.

Two helicopters landed and about 40 soldiers searched the house where the women had stayed and a second, vacant house. Soon after, the two houses were blown up - although witnesses offered differing accounts of how. Some said the houses were attacked by helicopters. Others said the Americans detonated them with explosives.

Some of the men tried to approach the Americans but were driven back by gunshots, the survivors said. The troops took money and jewelry the dead women had brought for the party, survivors said.

At the cemetery outside Ramadi, Taleb Nawaf pointed to a fresh grave with a headstone marked "Amal Rikab and Kholood."

Mourners displayed photographs of six children and their parents, Mohammed and Morifa Rikad, saying all had died in the bombing.

The U.S. occupation has never been popular in Anbar, a Sunni Muslim province which includes Fallujah, Khaldiyah and other centers of resistance.

I just got polled! It was for the state of Arizona, done by the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism (ahem) through ASU.

I did not take notes but here are many, if not all, of the questions (because the topic of the media was included and I'm reading your post first after hanging up the phone I'm posting here):

Prisoner abuse, has the media reported too much (yes)

More pics out there, should they be given to the media (no)

Should the Nick Berg video have been shown on tv (I told him I was torn and talked a bit so he put me down as don't know)

Approve or Disapprove of GWB 1) job 2) economy 3) Iraq (approve on all)

*Then the media questions:

Do you find the media trustworthy on 4 grades from extremely trustworthy to extremely UNtrustworthy. I said extremely UNtrustworthy

Do you think the first amendment goes too far in allowing the media reporting (no)

Do you think the government should have the right to review and revise media reports (no)

Then it moved on to gas prices.

Who do you blame for high prices (OPEC)---It was not multiple choice and the interviewer actually said when I gave that answer that everybody is saying that.

Have you curtailed driving due to gas price and there were 4 choices from A lot, somewhat, have not, have a great deal.

Then it asked profiling questions like how you are registered (Republican)

Race

Age

If I follow politics--then four gradations of how closely and I chose the very closely.

I just remembered that after the Bush approval questions it asked if the election were held today would you vote for: And he listed Bush, Kerry and Nader (GWB)

It did not probe my level of voting habits and the like so I'll guess this will be classified as polling registered voters.

Well! I thought it was VERY interesting that the media got several questions about them.

Finally, transcript up from yesterday's briefing. No surprise it was none other than Campbell Brown (who is hot on the trail of prisoner abuse over there, but was indeed one of the reporters to refer to "the wedding". See her initial question before the excerpt I have below).

Here is the response Kimmitt gave that I had wanted to post:

Kimmitt/Senor Briefing, May 20, 2004

Q And on the situation yesterday, you said that you were fairly convinced this was not what some of the Iraqis were saying, a wedding party that was hit, but -- and part of the justification was the weapons and everything else you found. But it sounds like, you know, $1,000, a few weapons are not that unusual here. Do you have other evidence that would suggest this is definite, and will there be an investigation?

GEN. KIMMITT: Well, certainly because of the interest that's been shown by the media we're going to have an investigation. Some of the allegations that have been made would cause us to go back and look at this. But it's important to understand that this operation was not something that just fell out of the sky.

We had significant intelligence which caused us to conduct a military operation into the middle of the desert, 85 kilometers south of Husaybah, al Qaim, and 25 kilometers inside from the Syrian border. Relatively barren area. We had a group of people there, not Bedouin. They were -- would appear to have been town dwellers. You saw 4x4s, jewelry. This is one of those routes that we have watched for a long period of time as a place where foreign fighters and smugglers come into this country.

We have consistently talked inside this forum about the foreign fighter flow. This was clearly, in our -- the intelligence that we had suggested that this was a foreign fighter "rat line," as we call them, one of the way stations. We conducted military operations down there last night. The ground force that swept through the objective found a significant amount of material and intelligence which validated that attack. And we are satisfied at this point that the intelligence that led us there was validated by what we found on the ground, and it was not that there was a wedding party going on.

~SNIP~

(different reporter, with the WaPo)

Q For General Kimmitt, sir. There was footage shown on Associated Press Television Network yesterday that seemed to depict civilians who were purportedly killed in the incident near the Syrian border. Is the military disputing that any civilians were killed? There were graphic images of dead children. Does the military have a position on whether these children were killed in this incident?

GEN. KIMMITT: The persons that we had on the ground did not find -- and they were on the ground for an extensive period of time -- they did not find any dead children among the casualties of that engagement.

~SNIP~

I heard this briefing live yesterday and noted on a thread immediately the last part about not finding any dead children. Then I heard the rest of the day about how there were children killed during this operation and NOT ONE media outlet reported what Kimmitt said here.

That's why I wanted this transcript.

Unbelieveable.

Check this out. He must have been asked about "the wedding singer" while I was typing my notes yesterday because I missed this. I think the end of Kimmitt's answer sounds familiar. I was so taken with his definitive reply when I just read it, I feel compelled to post it here (and I am thoroughly charmed by their term "the RAT line"):

Q Yes, Mike Georgia (sp) from Reuters. There are relatives of a well-known wedding singer who say he and his brother were killed in this incident near the Syrian border. And they brought the bodies back to Baghdad. Are you willing to sort of review your assessment of what happened in terms of civilians and combatants at this point?

GEN. KIMMITT: Oh, absolutely. We said we're going to do an investigation. We're going to take a hard look at that.

Obviously, for operational and security reasons, I can't reveal much of the details of what got us there and what we did while we were there. But I am persuaded that, again, the purposes that caused us to conduct that operation in the middle of the barren desert in the early mornings (sic) of the hour, which is kind of an odd time to be having a wedding, against what we believed to be 34 to 35 men and a number of women, less than a handful of women, which doesn't seem to be numbers that one would associate with a wedding, by a group in their four-by- fours, well away from any town, in a known RAT line, which is being used by smugglers and foreign fighters frequently, and other intelligence that we found on the ground, pretty well convinces us that what got us there had a valid purpose.

Are we going to take a look at it, are we going to review it, are we going to conduct some measure of investigation based on some of the things that we're hearing here? Of course we are. I think that's the only prudent thing to do. And we may find out new information that we don't have currently. But we are satisfied that the intelligence that we had, the multiple correlated evidence that got us there, and the actions of our forces on the ground, what they found and what they brought back -- foreign passports, money, weapons, satellite communications -- would be inconsistent with a wedding party for sure, and fairly consistent with what we have seen throughout this country time after time after time, which is the flow of foreign fighters to come in to terrorize and kill the Iraqi citizens.

Q Is it possible that you were targeting these fighters and you hit a wedding party next door? Is that possible?

GEN. KIMMITT: Well, I think let's let the investigation bear out. But this was not "next door." This was in the middle of the open desert.

~SNIP~

Dang, these reporters just take the (wedding) cake.

More mysteries:

_________________________________________________________________________________

Today: May 21, 2004 at 17:31:47 PDT

Iraq Desert Bombing Video Shows Carnage

By SCHEHEREZADE FARAMARZI
ASSOCIATED PRESS

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -

Fragments of musical instruments, tufts of women's hair, and a large blood stain are among the scenes in Associated Press Television News film of a destroyed house that survivors say U.S. planes bombed during a wedding party.

It is the first known footage from the site of Wednesday's attack, which killed up to 45 people, mostly women and children from the Bou Fahad tribe in Mogr el-Deeb, a desert village on the Syrian border.

The U.S. military has said the target was a suspected safehouse for foreign fighters from Syria and denied Friday that children were killed in the airstrikes.

Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt told reporters in Baghdad that U.S. troops who reported back from the operation "told us they did not shoot women and children."

"There were a number of woman, a handful of women, I think the number was four to six, caught up in the engagement. They may have died from some of the fire that came from the aircraft," Kimmitt said.

But an Associated Press reporter in the Ramadi area, at least 275 miles east of Mogr el-Deeb, was able to identify at least 10 of the bodies as those of children.

At the Bou Fahad cemetery outside Ramadi, where the tribe is based, each of the 28 fresh graves contain one to three corpses, mostly of mothers and their young children.

Relatives said they include those of 2-year-old Kholood and 1-year-old Anoud, daughters of Amal Rikad, who was killed; of 2-year-old Raad and 1-year-old Ra'ed - whose headless body was found near his house - sons of Fatima Madhi, who was killed; of Saad, 10, Faisal, 7, Anoud, 6, Fasila, 5, Kholood, 4, and Inad, 3 - children of Mohammed and Morifa Rikad, who were killed.

There also are photo images of dead children, but it was not possible to determine if those victims were already accounted for by relatives.

In Washington, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Richard Myers told Congress that "we feel at this point very confident that this was a legitimate target, probably foreign fighters" who may have ties to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian wanted for allegedly organizing attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq on behalf of al-Qaida.

"The intelligence right now and what we found at the site, which were weapons and the sort of things you might not expect at a wedding party, were not consistent with that. They were consistent with folks trying to come into the country, across the desert, in vehicles, staying for the night, trying to make it into Iraq."

Several shotguns, handguns, Kalashnikov rifles and machine guns were found at the site, according to Kimmitt.

But Bou Fahad tribesmen denied that any foreign fighters were among them. They consider the desolate border area part of their territory and follow their goats, sheep and cattle there to graze. In the springtime they leave spacious homes in Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province, and roam the desert.

Smuggling livestock into Syria is also part of a herdsman's life, although no one in the tribe acknowledged that.

Weddings are often marked in Iraq with celebratory gunfire, but survivors insisted no weapons were fired Wednesday - despite speculation by Iraqi officials that this drew a mistaken American attack.

The first bomb hit the huge goat-hair tent - where male guests were said to be sleeping - at about 2:45 a.m. Wednesday. The barrage didn't stop until sunrise, witnesses said. Women and children were in an adjacent one-story house and the men went to their nearby homes, they said.

After the first missile, Hamdan Khalaf ran in panic and hid in a grassy area.

"In the morning, we went back to the hill and saw people torn apart, attacked by the plane," Khalaf, who was not wounded, told APTN.

"We pulled them out of here," another man told APTN, standing on a pile of stones as he picked up a stained green cloth that looked like part of a young man's shirt. A severed arm lay in the rubble. "We took them to hospital - straight to the fridge," the unidentified man said.

An angry voice in the background of the tape denounced President Bush. "This is his terrorism," the voice said.

The body of what survivors said was the wedding's cameraman was pulled out of the debris Thursday.

The footage also showed women in colorful clothes sifting through the wreckage and carrying away blankets and other goods. Pieces of rockets and bullet casings were strewn across the sandy plain, as were pots and pans and a satellite dish. Partly charred pickup trucks and a water tanker stood in the desert.

The attack left few survivors. About a dozen wounded were taken to the town of Qaem, about 140 miles northwest of Ramadi and 130 miles north of Mogr el-Deeb.

Witnesses, interviewed Thursday by AP in Ramadi, said revelers at the wedding party began worrying when they heard aircraft overhead at about 9 p.m. Tuesday. Then came military vehicles, which stopped about two miles away from the village and switched off their headlights. The planes were still overhead at 11 p.m, so the hosts told the band to stop playing and everyone went to bed.

About four hours later, airstrikes began and continued until dawn when two helicopters landed and about 40 soldiers searched the house where the women had stayed and a second, vacant house. Soon after, the two houses were blown up. Some witnesses said the houses were attacked by helicopters; others said Americans detonated them with explosives.

Kimmitt confirmed that the operation was an air and ground assault. "Those people on the ground identified no children as part of that location that were killed," he said, adding that they reported only adult deaths.

He also referred to the APTN video, shot Thursday in Mogr el-Deeb, as well as separate APTN footage from Wednesday in Ramadi that showed a headless body of a child and other bodies of children.

"What we saw in those APTN videos were substantially inconsistent with the reports we received from the unit that conducted the operation," Kimmitt said. "We're now trying to figure out why there's an inconsistency.

"We're keeping an open mind as to exactly what happened on the ground. That's why we're continuing to try to gather all the facts; that's why we're not ruling out anything based on information coming forward," he added.

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