A United States F-16 jet fired missiles into a residential area in the flashpoint Sunni city of Fallujah on Saturday, killing at least 22 members of one extended family.
A US spokesman said the aircraft had been targeting a safe house belonging to the terrorist network run by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian directing a suicide bombing campaign against coalition forces in the new Iraqi security organisations.
Brigadier-General Mark Kimmitt did not dispute Iraqi accounts that more than 20 people were killed in the attack, but said there was ‘significant intelligence’ that members of the network were in the house. He admitted there was no evidence Zarqawi was there.
One resident contacted by telephone by The Observer, who had been to the scene of the explosion in the poor Shouhadda area, in the south west of the city, said that at least 22 people had been killed.
Dr Fadhil al-Baddrani said the entire family of Mohammed Hamadi, a 65-year-old farmer, married with two wives, were killed. Among the dead where his wives and children. At least three women and five children were among the dead. ‘The whole family is gone,’ said al-Baddrani. ‘The blast was so powerful it blew them to pieces. We could only recognise the women by their long hair.’
He added that the carnage had been met by angry scenes within the city, with residents accusing the US of staging a ‘provocation’ intended to reignite fighting in a city that has seen the strongest resistance to the US occupation.
The air strike, and its high death toll among women and children, will inflame tensions at a moment of high tension in Iraq.
Senior coalition officials had been congratulating themselves in recent days for ‘neutralising’ the inflammatory effect of fighting in Fallujah and Najaf, in the run-up to the handover of power on 30 June.
It is a doubly worrying in Fallujah as coalition sources have privately admitted that the ‘Iraqi-isation’ of the problem there is close to failing. Among the first to condemn the US attack was the city’s police chief. ‘At 9:30 am, a US plane shot two missiles on this residential area,’ said the police chief, Sabbar al-Janabi, ‘Scores were killed and injured. This picture speaks for itself.’
At least two houses were destroyed and six others were damaged as slabs of concrete and steel reinforcing bars were up-ended and twisted skyward in the damage, Associated Press Television News footage showed.
Water poured from a six-metre crater in front of one of the destroyed house. One man displayed several copies of the Koran which were burnt in the strikes.
Outraged residents accused America of trying to inflict maximum damaged by firing two strikes — one first to attack and another to kill the rescuers.
‘The number of casualties is so high because after the first missile we jumped to rescue the victims,’ said Wissam ali-Hamad. ‘The second missile killed those trying to carry out the rescue.’
US Marines pulled back from Fallujah late last April after three weeks of fighting after four American security contractors were killed in an ambush and their bodies mutilated. Ten Marines and hundreds of Iraqis, many of them civilians, died before the siege was lifted and security was handed over to an Iraqi volunteer force, the Fallujah Brigade.
Al-Zarqawi has been blamed for the string of car bombs across Iraq, including one last Thursday that killed 35 people and wounded 145 at an Iraqi military recruiting centre in Baghdad.
US troops also fought insurgents north-east of Baghdad for a fourth day in fighting that has killed at least six Iraqis and one American soldier, according to US military sources and witnesses. In southern Iraq, a roadside bomb killed at least two people, including a Portuguese security officer.
The latest violence comes against a background of increased violence in Iraq in the run up to the handover of sovereignty at the end of this month.
Violence that has led senior ministers in the new Iraqi interim government to threaten ’emergency measures’ including martial law or new curfews, should the security situation not improve. – Guardian Unlimited Â