Images of death and destruction from a wedding video were aired on Arab television channels on Monday as the United States military admitted its insistence that foreign fighters had been killed in an airstrike was inconsistent with Iraqi claims that a marriage party had been hit.
The footage supplied by the US Associated Press Television News shows a decorated wedding vehicle and Arab guests arriving for the celebrations.
Musicians play drums and a keyboard synthesiser as men and children dance.
But the picture cuts to the dead body of a man shown earlier playing the keyboard.
He lies in the back of a pickup truck as men load what appears to be another corpse wrapped in a sheets into vehicle.
Al-Arabiya and Al-Jazeera channels showed people picking through the rubble of a razed house surrounded by desert sands. A series of tents have been flattened and household goods lie strewn around.
The stations commented that Associated Press could not guarantee the authenticity of the video it had acquired.
US Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt acknowledged on Saturday that six women were among 41 people killed in the attack targeted at foreign fighters.
”There are still some inconsistencies. We still remain open-minded about this. We will continue to look into everything that is provided to us in the way of evidence,” the military spokesperson said.
Kimmitt said US forces that scoured the area of the combined ground and air attack in the western Iraqi desert had found ”no evidence of a wedding”, but did not rule out some other kind of social gathering.
”Bad people have parties too and it may have … just been a meeting in the middle of the desert by some people that were conducting either criminal or terrorist activities,” he said.
Troops on the ground had discovered items such as ”terrorist training manuals”, military binoculars, foreign passports, medical equipment and possible narcotics, and dormitory-style accommodation for 300 people, he said.
Kimmitt repeated that Wednesday’s attack was based on intelligence that armed insurgents were gathering in the remote desert near the Syrian border, and reiterated that US ground forces were fired on before calling in the air strike.
Al-Arabiya has already aired footage of bodies wrapped in blankets and loaded on to trucks, and quoted witnesses as saying that aircraft also destroyed other houses apart from the venue of the wedding party.
”We believe six [women] were killed, we acknowledge that,” Kimmitt said, but reiterated that forces had not seen bodies of children.
He added that the terrain shown in the footage on television did not match that around the scene of the attack, saying he believed the bodies were filmed in Ramadi, closer to the capital. — Sapa-AFP