Haditha: the worst US atrocity since Vietnam … Iraqi women and children massacred by American marines. How did it happen?

SPECIAL REPORT BY NEIL MACKAY (The Sunday Herald)

CIVILIANS who spent time at the Haditha Dam base of the Third Battalion of the First Marines describe the place as something out of Apocalypse Now or Lord Of The Flies. It was “feral” one said. Soldiers didn’t wash. They had abandoned regulation billets and had built make-shift, primitive huts bearing skull-and-crossbone signs. The place stank. One American civilian engineer attached to the camp, with the task of keeping the huge hydro-electric dam nearby operating, said he was terrified of the soldiers he had to live alongside.

Kilo Company was part of the Third Battalion. At 7.15am on November 19 last year, as a column of Kilo Company Humvees drove down the Hay al-Sinnai Road in Haditha, a bomb exploded under the last vehicle – the “tail-end charlie” – killing the driver, 20-year-old Lance Corporal Miguel Terrazas.

What happened next will go down in US military history as the worst deliberate atrocity carried out against unarmed civilians by American forces since the notorious massacre at My Lai in Vietnam when GIs killed around 500 people – mainly women, children and the elderly.

Minutes after Terrazas died, the remaining 13-strong unit of marines went on a bloody rampage, wiping out whole families, killing women, children and an elderly man in a wheelchair, and hurling grenades into homes. In all, 24 Iraqi civilians were murdered by American troops. The killings are already having a corrosive effect on US society, war-weary from scandals such as the torture of detainees at Abu Ghraib and the ever-mounting death toll of American troops. US government sources say some of the marines involved will be put on trial, and could face the death penalty for their crimes.

The men of Kilo Company have been involved in some of the worst horrors of the Iraq war, including the assault on Fallujah which involved close-up killing and hand-to-hand fighting. Many of the marines in Kilo Company were on their second tour of duty in Iraq at the time of the massacre in Haditha.

As soon as the shooting stopped, the marines started to lie and cover up the truth about the Haditha killings. The faked-up version of events went something like this: as a taxi drove up Hay al-Sinnai Road towards the Humvee column, the marines waved to it to stop. When the Humvees and the taxi came to a halt, a bomb detonated, indicating, the marines claimed, that the taxi was either meant to lure the Humvees over the bomb or that someone in the taxi detonated the bomb. The marines claimed they immediately came under fire from nearby houses once the bomb exploded.
The four passengers in the taxi and the driver fled, the marines claimed, and were all shot dead. Soldiers then returned fire on the positions shooting at them, killing eight insurgents. Fifteen civilians, they said, also died in the explosion which killed the Humvee driver Terrazas.

Investigations by the military, accounts by survivors and reports by human rights organisations and medics have proved that this version of events contains barely a grain of truth.

Eman Waleed, a nine-year-old girl, was a few minutes walk from the site of the bomb which caught the Humvee, at the home of her grandfather Abdul Hamid Hassan Ali, an 89-year-old amputee in a wheelchair. Eman recalls the moment the killings started. “We heard a big noise that woke us all up. Then we did what we always do when there’s an explosion – my father goes into his room with the Koran and prays that the family be spared any harm.”

While her father prayed, Eman, her mother, grandfather, grandmother, two brothers, two aunts and two uncles stayed together in the main room. Eman recalls sitting in her pyjamas and hearing shooting as the marines moved towards her home. They stormed into the house, went to the room where Eman’s father was praying and shot him dead. Then they entered the room where the rest of the family were huddled together.

“I couldn’t see their faces very well,” said Eman, “only their guns sticking into the doorway. I watched them shoot my grandfather, first in the chest and then in the head. Then they killed my granny.”

The marines started to spray the corner of the room with automatic fire where Eman and her eight-year-old brother Abdul were being shielded by the other adults. Both Eman and Abdul were wounded but survived. Eman’s aunt fled the house as the shooting started, taking her five-month-old niece with her. She escaped. Her husband, who also tried to escape, was shot in the head. In total, seven family members died. Eman’s grandfather was shot nine times. His death certificate notes that his intestines had spilled through the exit wounds in his back.

Only one of the adults in the house that day survived. Eman and her brother hid under a bed, with their family lying dead around them, and waited two hours before Iraqi soldiers arrived to help them.

The marines then moved to the house of Younis Salim Khafif, which he shared with his wife, Aida, and their six children. Aida was in bed recovering from an operation so her sister was in the house to help out with family chores. A neighbour says he heard Younis beg for his life, telling the marines in English: “I am a friend, I am good.” They shot him anyway. Eight people in the house that day – everybody apart from a 12-year-old girl – were murdered as the marines opened fire and then lobbed in hand grenades. The children who died were aged 14, 10, five, three and one.
The surviving child, Safa, said she lay on the ground, pretending to be dead and covered in her sister’s blood. She recalls the blood spurting out of her sister like water from a tap, and the soldiers kicking the bodies of the dead. “I was wishing to be alive,” she said. “Now I wish I had died with them.”

Further up the street, four brothers aged between 20 and 38 were at home. The women inside the house were forced outside at gunpoint by the marines – then the men were shot dead. A relative said the Americans put the brothers in a wardrobe and machine-gunned them.

Finally, back at the bomb site, a taxi entered the street and was stopped by marines. The four students inside and the driver were ordered out of the car and shot dead. Of the 24 people killed, only one had been carrying a weapon.

When the killings were over, the marines cordoned off the area. They later took the dead to Haditha hospital – they left them in body bags in the garden and drove off.

Taher Thabet, an Iraqi journalism student, later filmed the bodies in the morgue and the scenes of the killings. He passed the tape on to the Iraqi organisation the Hammurabi Human Rights Group and it confirmed that the civilians were killed not by the booby trap which took the life of Terrazas, but by Terrazas’s enraged comrades. The rooms where the civilians were killed were riddled with bullets and splattered with blood.

A doctor at the hospital said there were no signs of shrapnel wounds from explosives on the bodies, instead “the bullet wounds were very apparent”. “Most of the victims were shot in the chest and head from close range.” Death certificates for all the murdered Iraqi civilians also showed they were all shot – many in the head and chest.

One marine who had to help clear up the aftermath of the murders and remove the bodies, Lance Corporal Roel Ryan Briones, said he was traumatised by what he’d seen. “They ranged from little babies to adult males and females,” he said. “I’ll never be able to get that out of my head. I can still smell the blood. This left something in my head and heart.”

Briones’s mother added: “He had to carry a little girl’s body. Her head was blown off and her brain splattered on his boots.”

After the killings a group of elders from Haditha, led by the mayor, protested to local marine commanders. They were dismissed with the claim that the killings were an accident. Even when the videotape was handed to marine commanders, they claimed it was “AQI [al-Qaeda in Iraq] propaganda”.

When it became clear that the civilians had been shot by US soldiers, the marines switched to saying that the deaths were the fault of insurgents who “placed non-combatants in the line of fire as the marines responded to defend themselves”. However, that claim also fell apart when other senior US commanders in Baghdad saw the tape and a criminal investigation was opened.

Military police travelled to Haditha, examined the murder scenes, spoke to survivors and interviewed marines. The marine’s story quickly collapsed and members of Kilo Company started to implicate each other.

Military investigators have now briefed a group of US congressmen, telling them a number of men in Kilo Company may soon be charged with murder. There are also likely to be other charges of dereliction of duty and making false statements. Representative John Kline, a Republican and a former marine, said: “This was a small number of marines who fired directly on civilians and killed them. This is going to be an ugly story … There is no doubt that the marines allegedly involved in doing this lied about it. They certainly tried to cover it up.”

John Murtha, an anti-war Democratic congressman and decorated marine war veteran, said: “They killed innocent civilians in cold blood and that’s what the report [by the military into the killings and cover-up] is going to tell. It is as bad as Abu Ghraib, if not worse.”

So far, three marine officers, including the commander of Kilo Company and the commander of the third battalion, have been relieved of duty. The investigation is centred on the NCO who was leading Kilo Company on the day, and was allegedly at the scene of nearly every killing, and a number of other soldiers who are said to have taken part directly in the killings. Sources close to the investigation have named the ranking marine as 25-year-old Sgt Frank Wuterich. Up to nine other men witnessed the killings but did nothing.

President Bush has said of the marine massacre that “those who violated the law will be punished”. Bush also apparently roasted his secretary of defence, Donald Rumsfeld, for not informing him of the killings promptly when Rumsfeld learned of the events in March.

Following the killings, Iraq’s current prime minister, Nouri Maliki, heavily criticised what he described as habitual attacks on civilians by coalition forces. He said many troops had “no respect for civilians … and killed on a suspicion or a hunch”.

In response, US army commanders ordered that troops would undergo a two-hour course on “moral and ethical values”. The US army denied it was a limp and late face-saving exercise.

Suspicions have been raised that senior commanders were aware of what was happening in Haditha. Although some Iraqis claim that US marines burned houses in the area, others said warplanes dropped bombs on a number of homes. Senior commanders would have had to green light such an action.

So far, the marines have paid out $2500 (just over £1300) to each of the families of 15 of the victims. The senior officer who ordered the payments ruled that those killed had not taken part in any attacks on US forces.

Shortly after the massacre, Kilo Company held a memorial service for their dead comrade Terrazas. Messages such as “TJ you were a great friend” were written on stones and piled up in a funeral mound.

The bodies of the 24 men, women and children killed in the hours after Terrazas’s death are in a cemetery known as the martyrs’ graveyard. On a nearby wall graffiti reads: “Democracy assassinated the family that was here.”

Waleed Mohammed, a lawyer representing some of the families, said the survivors were waiting desperately for news of criminal charges being pressed against the marines of Kilo Company. “They are convinced that the sentence will be like one for someone who has killed a dog in the United States,” he said, “because Iraqis have become like dogs in the eyes of Americans.”

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Hat tip: This Old Brit.