By Tyler Yates
Impunity Watch Reporter, Middle East
BAGHDAD, Iraq — A diplomatic cable recently made public by WikiLeaks provides evidence that U.S. troops executed at least 10 Iraqi civilians, including a woman in her 70s and a 5-month old infant, before calling in an airstrike to destroy the evidence. This incident took place in 2006 in Iraq’s central city of Ishaqi.
The cable contains questions posed by a United Nations (U.N.) investigator about the incident after local Iraqi officials, who were angered by the soldier’s actions, demanded some sort of a remedial response. The official U.S. response at the time was to deny that anything out of the ordinary had occurred.
In 2006, at the time of the incident, Ishaqi, about 80 miles from Baghdad, and not too far from Saddam Hussein’s hometown of Tikrit, was considered extremely dangerous. All roads in the area had been classified as “black,” meaning that there was a high probability they were booby-trapped with bombs.
The original report of the incident put the fault on an intense battle with an Iraqi Al Qaeda suspect that resulted in the complete decimation of the house he was hiding in, and the death of all of its inhabitants.
Townspeople denied this explanation, claiming instead that the soldiers had executed the 11 people living in the house, but military officials said that other accounts of the incident were highly unlikely to be true, and that they didn’t warrant further investigation.
Philip Alston, the U.N.’s special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, sent the cable to Condoleeza Rice, then Secretary of State, 12 days after the incident took place. He had a different view of how the events unfolded. Most disconcerting was his revelation that the autopsies performed on the dead from the incident revealed that they had been handcuffed and shot in the head. Among the dead were four women and five children, all of which were 5 years old or younger.
Alston’s version of the events is as follows: The troops approached a house belonging to a local farmer, and were met with gunfire lasting about 25 minutes. After the firefight ended “troops entered the house, handcuffed all residents and executed all of them.” After the initial ground operation was completed a U.S. air raid occurred that destroyed the house. “Iraqi TV stations broadcast from the scene and showed bodies of the victims.”
When questioned in an interview on Wednesday after the cable became public knowledge, Alston said that as of 2010 the U.S. officials still hadn’t responded to his requests for more information. He further said that such inaction and lack of response “was the case with most of the letters to the U.S. in the 2006-2007 period” of the Iraq war.
“The tragedy,” he continued, “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.”
The newly leaked cable seems to vindicate the townspeople’s claims, and creates a lot of questions for both the military and Washington. While civilian casualties are sadly a common occurrence during raid operations the killings described in the cable would clearly constitute a war crime.
Not surprisingly, the Pentagon hasn’t responded to any requests for comments on the incident, or the leak.
For more information, please see:
Daily Mirror — WikiLeaks reveals Atrocities by U.S. forces — 1 Sept 2011
Digital Journal — WikiLeaks cable says Iraqi children shot in head during U.S. raid — 1 Sept 2011
Huffington Post — WikiLeaks: U.S. Troops Executed Iraqi Children in 2006 Raid, According to U.N. Sources — 1 Sept 2011
International Business Times — WikiLeaks Cable Release: New Evidence that U.S. Troops May Have Massacred Iraqi Civilians — 1 Sept 2011
McClatchy — WikiLeaks: Iraqi children in U.S. raid shot in head, U.N. says — 31 Aug 2011
