New York, March 26, 2006

THE villagers of Abu Sifa near the Iraqi town of Balad had become used to the sound of explosions at night as American forces searched the area for suspected insurgents. But one night two weeks ago Issa Harat Khalaf heard a different sound that chilled him to the bone.

Khalaf, a 33-year-old security officer guarding oil pipelines, saw a US helicopter land near his home. American soldiers stormed out of the Chinook and advanced on a house owned by Khalaf’s brother Fayez, firing as they went.

Khalaf ran from his own house and hid in a nearby grove of trees. He saw the soldiers enter his brother’s home and then heard the sound of women and children screaming.

"Then there was a lot of machinegun fire," he said last week. After that there was the most frightening sound of all — silence, followed by explosions as the soldiers left the house.

Once the troops were gone, Khalaf and his fellow villagers began a frantic search through the ruins of his brother’s home. Abu Sifa was about to join a lengthening list of Iraqi communities claiming to have suffered from American atrocities.

According to Iraqi police, 11 bodies were pulled from the wreckage of the house, among them four women and five children aged between six months and five years. An official police report obtained by a US reporter for Knight Ridder newspapers said: "The American forces gathered the family members in one room and executed 11 people."

The Abu Sifa deaths on March 15 were first reported last weekend on the day that Time magazine published the results of a 10-week investigation into an incident last November when US marines killed 15 civilians in their homes in the western Iraqi town of Haditha.

The two incidents are being investigated by US authorities, but persistent eyewitness accounts of rampaging attacks by American troops are fuelling human rights activists’ concerns that Pentagon commanders are failing to curb military excesses in Iraq.

The Pentagon claims to have investigated at least 600 cases of alleged abuse by American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, and to have disciplined or punished 230 soldiers for improper behaviour. But a study by three New York-based human rights groups, due to be published next month, will claim that most soldiers found guilty of abuse received only "administrative" discipline such as loss of rank or pay, confinement to base or periods of extra duty.

Of the 76 courts martial that the Pentagon is believed to have initiated, only a handful are known to have resulted in jail sentences of more than a year — notably including the architects of detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib prison.

Most other cases ended with sentences of two, three or four months. "That’s not punishment, and that’s the problem," said John Sifton of Human Rights Watch, which is compiling the study with two other groups.

"Our concern is that abuses in the field are not being robustly investigated and prosecuted, and that they are not setting an example with people who cross the line," said Sifton. "There is a clear preference by the military for discipline with administrative and non-judicial punishments instead of courts martial. That sends the message that you can commit abuse and get away with it."

Yet the evidence from Haditha and Abu Sifa last week suggested that the Pentagon is finding it increasingly difficult to dismiss allegations of violent excesses as propaganda by terrorist sympathisers.

It was on November 19 last year that a US marine armoured vehicle struck a roadside bomb that killed a 20-year-old lance-corporal. According to a marine communiqué issued the next day, the blast also killed 15 Iraqi civilians and was followed by an attack on the US convoy in which eight insurgents were killed.

An investigation by Time established that the civilians had not been killed by the roadside bomb, but were shot in their homes after the marines rampaged through Haditha. Among the dead were seven women and three children.

One eyewitness told Time: "I watched them shoot my grandfather, first in the chest and then in the head. Then they killed my granny."
A Pentagon inquiry has reportedly confirmed that the civilians were killed by marines. But it said the deaths were the result of "collateral damage" and not, as some villagers alleged, murder by marines taking revenge for the death of their comrade. The case has been handed over to the Naval Criminal Investigative Service to determine if the rules of war were broken.

In Abu Sifa last week, Khalaf’s account was corroborated by a neighbour, Hassan Kurdi Mahassen, who was also woken by the sound of helicopters and saw soldiers entering Fayez’s home after spraying it with such heavy fire that walls crumbled.

Mahassen said that once the soldiers had left — after apparently dropping several grenades that caused part of the house to collapse — villagers searched under the rubble "and found them all buried in one room".

"Women and even the children were blindfolded and their hands bound. Some of their faces were totally disfigured. A lot of blood was on the floors and the walls."

Khalaf said he had found the body of his mother Turkiya with her face unrecognisable. "She had been shot with a dumdum bullet," he claimed.

While many allegations of US atrocities have later turned out to be exaggerated or false, the Abu Sifa incident was supported by hospital autopsy reports that said all the victims had died from bullet wounds. A local Iraqi police commander — supposedly co-operating with US forces — confirmed that the bodies had been found with their wrists tied.

The US military put the number of civilians killed at four: two women, a child and a man. A spokesman said troops had gone to the house in response to a tip that a member of Al-Qaeda was there. The terrorist was found and arrested. The spokesman insisted that coalition forces "take every precaution to keep civilians out of harm’s way" and that it was "highly unlikely" that the Abu Sifa allegations were true.

Some villagers were quoted as confirming that an Al-Qaeda member was visiting the house. "But was my six-month-old nephew a member of Al-Qaeda?" asked Khalaf. "Was my 75-year-old mother also from that organisation?" While the Pentagon is investigating the incident, the soldiers involved remain on active duty.

Sifton acknowledged that human rights activists needed to distinguish between cases of detainee abuse — invariably carried out in cold blood — and incidents that occur on a dangerous and volatile battlefield.

"We are not unsympathetic to the stresses of battlefield situations," he said. "There’s a saying in the military that it’s better to be judged by 12 (a jury) than be carried by six (coffin-bearers). We would hesitate to second-guess a soldier’s reactions under fire. But there’s a limit to how much leniency you can give troops because of the fog of war. You can’t give the US military a free pass."

He added: "If they are pissed off because a buddy got killed and they want revenge, that’s a violation of the rules of war."

Senior officers have argued that insurgents are targeting the civilian population in order to blame coalition forces, and that troops are trained to take all reasonable precautions to prevent civilian casualties while defending themselves against attack.

The problem for the Pentagon is that every new incident involving civilian deaths triggers a new wave of anti-American fervour.

Last week Jalal Abdul Rahman told this newspaper about the death in January of his 12- year-old son Abdul. It was a Sunday evening and father and son were driving home after buying a new game for the boy’s PlayStation.

They were a few hundred yards from their home in the Karkh neighbourhood of Baghdad when — according to Rahman — US forces opened fire on the car, killing Abdul.
Soldiers approached the car and told Rahman he had failed to stop when ordered to do so. Rahman said he had never heard an order to stop. The soldiers searched the car and, as they departed, they threw a black body bag on the ground.

"They said, 'This is for your son,’ and they left me there with my dead son," he added.

Rahman claimed he had had nothing to do with the insurgency until that moment. "But this is America, the so-called guardian of humanity, and killing people for them is like drinking water. I shall go after them until I avenge the blood of my son."


Additional reporting: Ali Abdul Rahman, Abu Sifa, and Hamoudi Saffar and Ali Rifat, Baghdad

SPIES JUST CONFUSED SADDAM

A stream of US military intelligence allegedly passed to Saddam Hussein by Russian spies before the 2003 invasion of Iraq was either ignored or served to confuse him, according to former Republican Guard commanders, writes Tony Allen-Mills.

One commander told the Pentagon that Saddam and his sons dismissed accurate warnings that the main US force was bypassing southern cities and striking directly at Baghdad.

The leaks appeared to have served the coalition cause so successfully that military analysts speculated that they were part of a deliberate strategy of "fog generation" aimed at "obscuring the minds of Iraq’s senior leadership".

Copyright 2006 Times Newspapers Ltd.