Four Iraqis Killed by U.S. Troops

Lying heavily bandaged in his narrow hospital bed, Haider Jamil, 15 years old and newly orphaned, didn’t look angry Saturday, or even grief-stricken. He looked puzzled.

The shooting at a U.S. military checkpoint the night before -- which killed his parents, his grandmother and another man, hospital officials said -- came as the family’s pickup truck was slowing down and about to stop, Jamil said.

“We were coming to a halt. We thought that was what the soldiers wanted,” he said softly. “So why did they shoot at us?”

U.S. military authorities have a very different version of events. A coalition spokesman said soldiers at the checkpoint came under fire from an approaching van about 10:45 p.m. Friday and returned fire. The military was investigating the incident, U.S. Army Lt. Col. George Krivo added.

The bloodshed marked the latest such fatal incident in Fallouja, a town 30 miles west of Baghdad that for months has been a focal point of tensions between U.S. troops and Iraqi civilians.

On Sept. 12, eight Iraqi policemen were killed by U.S. forces in Fallouja, an apparent “friendly fire” incident that remains under American investigation. Five months earlier, at least 16 Iraqis were killed and 78 wounded during two days of violent anti-American demonstrations in the town.

The Friday night shooting added to the already ample reserves of bitterness against the U.S. presence here.

“Coalition forces are shooting indiscriminately at everybody. And when we ask why, they say they were defending themselves,” Mayor Taha Badawi Hamid said.

“The Americans are creating more hatred and hostility and enemies for themselves by behaving this way.”

The predominantly Sunni Muslim town on the Euphrates River has a deeply traditional tribal culture and, before the war, was home to a large cadre of Saddam Hussein loyalists.

Debate over the circumstances of the Fallouja shooting came on a day shadowed by security jitters. At first light Saturday, attackers fired a barrage of projectiles -- either missiles or rocket-propelled grenades -- at a tightly guarded hotel in central Baghdad that houses U.S. military officers and coalition civilian personnel.

No one was hurt and damage was described as extremely minor. But the brazenness of the attack -- a rare strike at a target within the so-called green zone, the most heavily fortified security area in the Iraqi capital -- rattled many coalition staffers, particularly coming on the heels of deadly bombings at the U.N. compound.

Witnesses in a quiet residential area just west of the landmark Rashid Hotel said attackers had set up a rocket launcher in the middle of the street just before 7 a.m., fired off rounds and fled.

At least one of the projectiles missed the hotel and landed harmlessly on a nearby house, neighborhood residents said.

Meanwhile, in Fallouja, U.S. forces spent much of the day defusing a powerful bomb that had been planted next to the mayor’s office. Most of the streets in the center of town were closed off during the bomb-clearing operation, which may have been a factor in preventing angry demonstrations in response to the checkpoint shooting.

Jamil, the 15-year-old who was wounded in the Fallouja shooting, was riding in the truck with his mother, father and grandmother, a neighbor and his infant sister. The baby was unhurt, doctors said, but all the other passengers were killed or wounded.

“I jumped out when the shooting began, but I was wounded in the back and the leg,” Jamil said. His grandmother bled to death before medical help arrived, he said.

Similar accounts of the shooting came from Taher Yassin Inizi, a 29-year-old shopkeeper who was a passenger in the truck, and from Fahmi Aziz, a 32-year-old man who was a passenger on a motorcycle traveling just in front of it.

Another man on the motorcycle was among the four dead, said the hospital’s director, Rafi Chiad.

“There was nothing to provoke them,” Aziz, the motorcycle passenger, said of the Americans. “They were under a highway bridge. We could hardly see them. When we saw them, we tried to stop. But they fired at us all at once -- tat-tat-tat!”

Jamil said the family was returning from a visit to relatives who live outside Fallouja.