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US Troops Kill 2 Women, and Iraqi Death Toll Grows    [

    US Troops Kill Pregnant Woman in Iraq
    By Kim Gamel
    The Associated Press

    Wednesday 31 May 2006

    U.S. forces killed two Iraqi women - one of them about to give birth - when the troops shot at a car that failed to stop at an observation post in a city north of Baghdad, Iraqi officials and relatives said Wednesday.

    Nabiha Nisaif Jassim, 35, was being raced to the maternity hospital in Samarra by her brother when the shooting occurred Tuesday.

    Jassim, the mother of two children, and her 57-year-old cousin, Saliha Mohammed Hassan, were killed by the U.S. forces, according to police Capt. Laith Mohammed and witnesses.

    The U.S. military said coalition troops fired at a car after it entered a clearly marked prohibited area near an observation post but failed to stop despite repeated visual and auditory warnings.

    "Shots were fired to disable the vehicle," the military said in a statement e-mailed to The Associated Press. "Coalition forces later received reports from Iraqi police that two women had died from gunshot wounds ... and one of the females may have been pregnant."

    Jassim's brother, who was wounded by broken glass, said he did not see any warnings as he sped his sister to the hospital. Her husband was waiting for her there.

    "I was driving my car at full speed because I did not see any sign or warning from the Americans. It was not until they shot the two bullets that killed my sister and cousin that I stopped," he said. "God take revenge on the Americans and those who brought them here. They have no regard for our lives."

    He said doctors tried but failed to save the baby after his sister was brought to the hospital.

    The shooting deaths occurred in the wake of an investigation into allegations that U.S. Marines killed unarmed civilians in the western city of Haditha.

    The U.S. military said the incident in Samarra, 60 miles north of Baghdad, was being investigated. The city is in the heart of the so-called Sunni Triangle and has in the past seen heavy insurgent activity.

    "The loss of life is regrettable and coalition forces go to great lengths to prevent them," the military said.

    The women's bodies were wrapped in sheets and lying on stretchers outside the Samarra General Hospital before being taken to the morgue, while residents pointed to bullet holes on the windshield of a car and a pool of blood on the seat.

    Khalid Nisaif Jassim, the pregnant woman's brother, said American forces had blocked off the side road only two weeks ago and news about the observation post had been slow to filter out to rural areas.

    He said the killings, like those in Haditha, were examples of random killings faced by Iraqis every day.

    The killings at Haditha, a city that has been plagued by insurgents, came after a bomb rocked a military convoy on Nov. 19, killing a Marine. Rep. John Murtha (news, bio, voting record), D-Pa., a decorated war veteran who has been briefed by military officials, has said Marines shot and killed unarmed civilians in a taxi at the scene and went into two homes and shot others.

    Military investigators have evidence that points toward unprovoked murders by Marines, a senior defense official said last week.

    In his first public comments on the incident, President Bush said he was troubled by the allegations, and that, "If in fact laws were broken, there will be punishment."

    Former Iraqi Foreign Minister Adnan Pachachi told the BBC that the allegations have "created a feeling of great shock and sadness and I believe that if what is alleged is true - and I have no reason to believe it's not - then I think something very drastic has to be done."

    "There must be a level of discipline imposed on the American troops and change of mentality which seems to think that Iraqi lives are expendable," said Pachachi, a member of parliament.

    If confirmed as unjustified killings, the episode could be the most serious case of criminal misconduct by U.S. troops during three years of combat in Iraq. Until now the most infamous occurrence was the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse involving Army soldiers, which came to light in April 2004 and which Bush said he considered to be the worst U.S. mistake of the entire war.

    Once the military investigation is completed, perhaps in June, it will be up to a senior Marine commander in Iraq to decide whether to press charges of murder or other violations of the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

    The incident has sparked two investigations - one into the deadly encounter itself and another into whether it was the subject of a cover-up. The Marine Corps had initially attributed 15 civilian deaths to the car bombing and a firefight with insurgents, eight of whom the Marines reported had been killed.

    "People in Samarra are very angry with the Americans not only because of Haditha case but because the Americans kill people randomly specially recently," Khalid Nisaif Jassim said.

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    US Troops Kill 2 Women, and Iraqi Death Toll Grows
    By John F. Burns
    The New York Times

    Thursday 01 June 2006

    Baghdad, Iraq - The American military command said Wednesday that United States troops had fatally shot two Iraqi women whose vehicle failed to stop after entering a "prohibited area" near the restive city of Samarra, about 65 miles north of Baghdad. The Iraqi police said one of the women may have been pregnant and on her way to a hospital.

    After the police in Samarra reported the deaths of the two women in the morning, the United States command in Baghdad issued a statement to The Associated Press. It said the vehicle carrying the women entered "a clearly marked prohibited area" near an American observation post outside Samarra, a major center for insurgent activity, and failed to stop despite "repeated visual and auditory warnings."

    "Shots were fired to disable the vehicle," it said. "Coalition forces later received reports from Iraqi police that two women had died from gunshot wounds." It added, "One of the females may have been pregnant."

    The women were among 54 new victims of the war reported by the Iraqi police and the American military command on Wednesday. They came on top of a toll in the previous 48 hours - at least 58 people reported killed across the country on Monday, and more than 40 on Tuesday, for a three-day total of more than 150 - that pointed to the relentless violence across Iraq that has followed the swearing-in of the new government 12 days ago.

    American and Iraqi officials had hoped that the accession of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki at the head of the cabinet of Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds, five months after 12.1 million Iraqis went to the polls to elect the first full-term government since the toppling of Saddam Hussein, might be a watershed that would bring a cresting of the violence.

    If anything, the opposite appears to have occurred, with the new government facing intensified challenges on a broad front. They have included a new surge in sectarian and insurgent violence in Baghdad, deadly feuds between rival Shiite militias in Basra and elsewhere in the south and a newly aggressive thrust by Sunni insurgents in the western province of Anbar, especially in the provincial capital of Ramadi.

    Sunni insurgents in Ramadi have posed such serious challenges in recent weeks that the top American military commander in Iraq, Gen. George W. Casey Jr., has ordered the deployment to Anbar of additional troops from a 3,500-member brigade of the First Armored Division that had been held in reserve in Kuwait. At least some of those troops will reinforce Marine units at Ramadi, military spokesmen say.

    Only six months ago, top United States commanders had said they hoped to begin the process of ordering staged troop reductions by mid-2006, with a target of reducing American troop levels to about 100,000 by the end of the year, down more than 30,000 from current levels. Some senior officers now say significant reductions may have to wait until mid-2007, at the earliest.

    The violence reported Wednesday also included the discovery of 42 bodies dumped around Baghdad, most of them shot in the head and showing signs of torture. The police said many of the bodies were found blindfolded and handcuffed, in the pattern of hundreds of others who have died in recent months in a wave of strife between Sunni and Shiite groups.

    In the latest in a series of killings of people involved with sports, Ali Jaafar, a sports broadcaster for the state-owned television channel, Al Iraqiya, was slain by machine-gun fire as he left his home for work. Last week, three members of the national tennis team were gunned down on a Baghdad street.

    The mayor of Miqdadiyah, a mixed Sunni-Shiite city about 70 miles northeast of the capital, was killed when a bomb hidden in an air-conditioner exploded, causing the governor of Diyala Province to declare the city under curfew.

    In Mosul, the northern oil center that is Iraq's second-largest city, at least five police officers were killed by a bomb left in a parked car that exploded as their patrol passed by.

    There were two new deaths among American troops, one of them a soldier killed by a roadside bomb in Baghdad on Tuesday night, another of a soldier who was said by the American command to have died Wednesday morning of a "non-combat-related cause."

    In Baghdad, a former governor of Diwaniya Province in southern Iraq was assassinated by gunmen as he left a restaurant on Tuesday evening, and a Shiite muezzin, the prayer-caller at a neighborhood mosque, was killed as left his home in a southern district of the city on Wednesday.

    A member of the local council in Adhamiya, a predominantly Sunni neighborhood in central Baghdad, said in a telephone interview that 18 Sunni men from the area had disappeared Monday after leaving in two vehicles to give blood at the capital's largest medical complex in response to a bomb attack outside a local Sunni mosque that killed 12 people and wounded at least 25.

    The American command reported Wednesday what it described as a major breakthrough in its hunt for insurgent leaders, the arrest Monday in Baghdad of a man it described as a principal organizer of the March 2004 attacks on Shiite pilgrims visiting mosques in Baghdad and Karbala that killed more than 180 people.

    The command's statement said the suspect, identified as Sheik Ahmed Hussein Dabash, was "a major financier and facilitator of terrorism in Iraq," and said he had been captured Monday in a raid by American and Iraqi forces in the Amiriya district of western Baghdad. "Coalition forces consider his capture significant as they believe he will provide critical information on other terrorist groups," it said.

    At the trial of Saddam Hussein and seven others for their suspected role in the persecution of the townspeople of Dujail, north of Baghdad, after an assassination attempt against Mr. Hussein in 1982, days of angry confrontations with defense lawyers led the chief judge, Raouf Abdel-Rahman, to order four defense witnesses detained Wednesday.

    Court officials said the four were being held under a law that provides for "investigative detention" while the judge looked into suspicions that the witnesses had been coached by defense lawyers and had given false testimony intended to exonerate Mr. Hussein and his associates.