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July 27, 2003
World: Americans
Turn Botched House Raid into Bloody Carnage
By Robert Fisk
Obsessed with capturing Saddam Hussein, American soldiers turned
a botched raid on a house in the Mansur district of Baghdad last night
into a bloodbath, opening fire on scores of Iraqi civilians in a crowded
street and killing up to 11, including two children, their mother
and crippled father. At least one civilian car caught fire, cremating
its occupants. The vehicle carrying the two children and their mother
and father, was riddled by bullets as it approached a razor-wired
checkpoint in the street outside the house.
Amid the fury generated among the largely middle-class residents of
Mansur - by ghastly coincidence, the killings were scarcely 40 metres
from the houses in which 16 civilians died when the Americans tried
to kill Saddam at the end of the invasion in April - whatever political
advantages gained by the killing of Saddam's sons were squandered.
A doctor at the Yarmouk hospital, which received four of the dead,
turned on me angrily last night, shouting: "If an American came
to my emergency room, maybe I
would kill him."
Two civilians, both believed to have been driving with their families,
were brought to the Yarmouk, one with abdominal wounds and the other
with "his brain outside of his head", according to another
doctor. At the scene of the killings, there was pandemonium. While
US troops were loading the bullet-shattered cars on trucks - and trying
to stop cameramen filming the carnage - crowds screamed abuse at them.
One American soldier a few feet from me climbed into the seat of his
Humvee, threw his helmet on the floor of the vehicle and shouted:
"Shit! Shit!"
There was no doubt about the target: the home of Sheikh Rabia Mohamed
Habib, a prominent tribal leader who had met Saddam but who was not
even in his house when the Americans stormed it. One report says they
killed a guard as they entered. "The Americans searched the house
completely, very roughly," Sheikh Habib said. "It seems
they thought Saddam Hussein was inside." One incensed man living
opposite the scene shouted at me: "The Americans didn't try to
help the civilians they had shot, not once. They let the car burn
and left the bodies where they lay, even the children. It was we who
had to take them to the hospitals."
Robert Fisk writes for the Independent of London. This
story is published by arrangement with the Independent syndicate.
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