1115.org

The BBC has uncovered new video evidence of a Haditha style massacre in the town of Ishaqi on March 15, 2006.

The BBC has uncovered new video evidence that US forces may have been responsible for the deliberate killing of 11 innocent Iraqi civilians.

The video appears to challenge the US military’s account of events that took place in the town of Ishaqi in March.
[…]
A spokesman for US forces in Iraq told the BBC an inquiry was under way.

The video pictures obtained by the BBC appear to contradict the US account of the events in Ishaqi, about 100km (60 miles) north of Baghdad, on 15 March 2006.

The US authorities said they were involved in a firefight after a tip-off that an al-Qaeda supporter was visiting the house.

According to the Americans, the building collapsed under heavy fire killing four people - a suspect, two women and a child.

But a report filed by Iraqi police accused US troops of rounding up and deliberately shooting 11 people in the house, including five children and four women, before blowing up the building.

The video tape obtained by the BBC shows a number of dead adults and children at the site with what our world affairs editor John Simpson says were clearly gunshot wounds.

The pictures came from a hardline Sunni group opposed to coalition forces.

It has been cross-checked with other images taken at the time of events and is believed to be genuine, the BBC’s Ian Pannell in Baghdad says.

Although this BBC report does not say so, the video also shows the building in question still partially standing with the bodies inside, supporting the Iraqi police version of events.

The March 15 date puts the Ishaqi massacre during the period when the military was still officially propagating a whitewashed versions of events at Haditha — namely that Iraqi civilians were killed in the crossfire as the marines battled insurgents — although it was widely known among the marines stationed at Haditha that the Iraqi civilians had in fact been shot and killed inside their own homes by the marines of Kilo Company.

It is hoped that the military’s Ishaqi investigation will also focus on whether knowledge that the Haditha massacre had been whitewashed was a factor in the Ishaqi killings.

*** Update, 4 pm ***

Here is a Reuters report datelined March 22, 2006—one week after the Ishaqi incident (via Robert Dreyfuss at TomPaine.com).

The U.S. military hit back on Wednesday at what it called a “pattern of misinformation” following Iraqi police accusations that its troops shot dead a family of 11 in their home last week.

Responding to comments by police and residents in the town of Ishaqi, north of Baghdad, that U.S. officers had failed to attend a meeting on Wednesday about the incident, Lieutenant Colonel Barry Johnson, a senior spokesman, told Reuters:

“There was no meeting scheduled with any Coalition investigators today. There appears to be a distinct pattern of misinformation surrounding this entire incident.

“This is another clear sign of that happening, making allegations for the sake of prompting media reporting and attempting to discredit Coalition operations. This is a pattern we’ve seen the terrorist-backed insurgency use repeatedly.”
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The military has launched an investigation into a raid last Wednesday by U.S. forces, in which an al Qaeda suspect was arrested, because of discrepancies between the police account and that of troops, who said only four people were killed.

The Ishaqi inquiry was announced days after the launch of a criminal investigation into events in the western town of Haditha in November, when U.S. Marines shot dead 15 civilians.

In Ishaqi, police said 11 people including five children under school age were found bound and shot in their home after the U.S. raid. The military said at the time that four people, including a guerrilla fighter, were killed.

Local journalists filmed the bodies of five young children, four women and two men who police said were killed in the raid.
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“We heard a barrage of shooting for 20 minutes and then we heard bombs,” said Thiya Hussein, who said his cousin was killed. “After the Americans left we went to the house and found 11 people lying in blood together in one room. Five of them were children. They were bound in plastic handcuffs and shot.”

“The baby, Husam, who was six-months-old, was shot dead. A 75-year-old woman was shot in the head,” he told Reuters.

The Ishaqi investigation was launched at the same time as the NCIS Haditha investigation. The reason we have heard absolutely nothing about the findings, the reason that even John Murtha does not appear to have heard about the findings, that wouldn’t have anything to do with the fact that Ishaqi hasn’t yet become a national scandal, would it? I guess we’ll know very soon.