US Accused of Killing Women and Children in Baghdad Raid

Agence France-Presse

Friday 28 September 2007

Baghdad - American forces were accused of killing 10 people, including women and children, in a Baghdad raid on Friday as the US military announced a senior Al-Qaeda leader was killed in an air strike.

The Iraqi government meanwhile Friday firmly rejected a Bosnia-style plan approved by the US Senate to divide Iraq on ethnic and religious lines, saying Iraqis will themselves decide their future.

Iraqi officials said the early-morning US air raid targeted a building in the majority Sunni Al-Saha neighbourhood in southwestern Baghdad where families were sleeping.

Bodies were pulled out of the rubble of the building, which was destroyed.

"Ten people were killed and seven wounded when American helicopters attacked Building No 139 at 2.00 am. We have no idea of the reason for the attack," said an interior ministry official.

There was no immediate comment from the US military.

An official at Baghdad's Al-Yarmuk hospital said 13 people - seven men, two women and four children - were killed and 10 men and a woman were wounded. He said all the casualties were civilians.

The survivors had said their building had been attacked by US helicopters early in the morning, the hospital official said.

A US commander, meanwhile, announced that a senior Al-Qaeda leader, Abu Usama al-Tunisi, was killed in an air strike on Tuesday southwest of Baghdad in the vicinity of Musayyib.

Brigadier General Joseph Anderson described the Tunisian as a close associate and likely successor to Abu Ayyub al-Masri, Al-Qaeda in Iraq's Egyptian leader.

The US military learned that he was meeting with other Al-Qaeda in Iraq members southwest of Baghdad in the vicinity of Musayyib on Tuesday.

"United States Air Force F-16 aircraft attacked the target," Anderson told reporters via video linkup from Baghdad.

"Reporting indicated that several Al-Qaeda members with ties to senior leadership were present at that time. Three were killed, including Tunisi," said Anderson, who is chief of staff of the Multi-National Corp Iraq.

On the political front, government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh said Iraq would have nothing to do with the US Senate plan to divide the country up.

"The government and its prime minister (Nuri al-Maliki) reject this vote," said .

"It is the Iraqis who decide these sorts of issues, no one else," Dabbagh said on state-run Al-Iraqiya television.

The plan, touted by backers as the sole hope of forging a federal state out of sectarian strife, was approved by the US Senate on Wednesday in a vote of 75 to 23.

The non-binding resolution, offered as an amendment to a defence policy bill, would provide for decentralising Iraq in a federal system as permitted by Iraq's constitution to stop the country from becoming a failed state.

It proposes to separate Iraq into Kurdish, Shiite and Sunni entities, with a federal government in Baghdad in charge of border security and oil revenues.

Security firm Blackwater USA came under further pressure on Friday over its Iraq operations with a damning US Congress report and further allegations of its supposedly gung-ho attitude splashed across newspapers.

Blackwater maintains its men were legitimately responding to an ambush while protecting a US State Department convoy during the September 16 shooting incident in which it is accused of killing 10 Iraqis, but a new US Congress report portrayed the company in a worse light.

The Congressional committee in Washington said that Blackwater had sent personnel to Fallujah in 2004 without proper support on a mission that ended in their deaths and sparked a brutal US military assault on the Iraqi city.

The New York Times, meanwhile, reported that Blackwater guards were ordered to "stop shooting" by a colleague during the latest Baghdad clash, which provoked a call from Iraq's prime minister for them to leave the country.

A US official close to the investigation into the incident in Baghdad's busy Nisoor Square told the newspaper that at least one Blackwater employee had continued to shoot at civilians even after calls for a ceasefire.

"Stop shooting - those are the words that we're hearing were used," said the official, who was not named.