Photo: In this Wednesday, March 15, 2006 file photo, Iraqis look at the bodies of those reportedly killed during a U.S. raid in the rural Ishaqi area, about 80 kilometers (50 miles) north of Baghdad in Iraq Wednesday, March 15, 2006. Iraqi government officials say they will investigate newly surfaced allegations that U.S. soldiers shot women and children, then tried to cover it up with an airstrike, during a 2006 hunt for insurgents. An adviser to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, Ali Al-Moussawi, said Friday Sept 2 2011 the government will revive its stalled probe now that new information about the March 15, 2006, raid has come to light.(AP Photo/ Hameed Rasheed, File)
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I remember when this incident happened, because I saw the photos from AP. I remember that the Iraqi people made the claim that the US troops executed these 11 people and then bombed the house to hide the evidence. I remember the US military denying this to all the news outlets. They were lying through their teeth.
The US troops took 11 innocent people, five of them children, and zip tied their hands together and put them in one room, then shot them point blank in the head. At least that is what the evidence and reports say. The UN investigated this, and a cable the UN guy wrote has been released by WikiLeaks. The UN guy asked the US military to investigate and to answer some questions. The US military did not, and that is because they do not give a shit about civilians in Iraq - they don't even give a shit about US citizens in the US military.
Here is the report from McClatchy Newspapers:
The unclassified cable, which was posted on WikiLeaks' website last week, contained questions from a United Nations investigator about the incident, which had angered local Iraqi officials, who demanded some kind of action from their government. U.S. officials denied at the time that anything inappropriate had occurred.
But Philip Alston, the U.N.'s special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, said in a communication to American officials dated 12 days after the March 15, 2006, incident that autopsies performed in the Iraqi city of Tikrit showed that all the dead had been handcuffed and shot in the head. Among the dead were four women and five children. The children were all 5 years old or younger.
Reached by email Wednesday, Alston said that as of 2010 — the most recent data he had — U.S. officials hadn't responded to his request for information and that Iraq's government also hadn't been forthcoming. He said the lack of response from the United States "was the case with most of the letters to the U.S. in the 2006-2007 period," when fighting in Iraq peaked.
Alston said he could provide no further information on the incident. "The tragedy," he said, "is that this elaborate system of communications is in place but the (U.N.) Human Rights Council does nothing to follow up when states ignore issues raised with them."
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The cable notes that "at least 10 persons, namely Mr. Faiz Hratt Khalaf, (aged 28), his wife Sumay'ya Abdul Razzaq Khuther (aged 24), their three children Hawra'a (aged 5) Aisha (aged 3) and Husam (5 months old), Faiz's mother Ms. Turkiya Majeed Ali (aged 74), Faiz's sister (name unknown), Faiz's nieces Asma'a Yousif Ma'arouf (aged 5 years old), and Usama Yousif Ma'arouf (aged 3 years), and a visiting relative Ms. Iqtisad Hameed Mehdi (aged 23) were killed during the raid."
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May these innocent victims rest in peace. May the killers - and those who sent the killers to Iraq - rot in hell forever.
And I am sure there are many more atrocities like this one in Iraq that we have heard nothing about.
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