http://www.truthout.org/docs_03/072903B.shtml
Troops Turn Botched Saddam Raid Into A Massacre
By Robert Fisk
The Independent
Monday 28 July 2003
BAGHDAD - Obsessed with capturing Saddam Hussein,
American soldiers turned a botched raid on a house in the
Mansur district of Baghdad yesterday 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 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
towards the end of the war in April - whatever political
advantages were gained by the killing of Saddam's sons
have been 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."
It appears the killings started as the troops were searching
the building and as motorists approached the barbed wire
which the soldiers had placed without warning across the
road. Witnesses said the first car contained at least two men.
"The second contained two children about 10, their mother
and their father who had been wounded in the Iran-Iraq war
- - he was a cripple," a local shopkeeper told me. "They all died.
The man's legs were cut in half by the bullets," he added. A
third car then approached the Americans, who opened fire
again. One of the occupants fled, but the other two remained
in the vehicle and were killed.
When another car arrived US troops riddled it with more
bullets and it burst into flames. It is believed that two people
were inside and both were burnt to death. "The Americans
didn't try to help the civilians they had shot, not once," a
witness said. "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."
Yet again, false informers, ill-trained American soldiers who
appeared to exercise no fire control and a lack of military
planning has created a tragedy among the people the Americans
claimed to be 'liberating' from Saddam Hussein only 15 weeks
ago. Last night, there were reports from the southern city of
Karbala that three men had been shot dead by American troops
during a demonstration.