Alleged Massacre By Marines Draws Muted Reaction In Iraq

By Hamza Hendawi
Of THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

BAGHDAD (AP)–The alleged murder of about 24 civilians by U.S. Marines in Haditha, a volatile town in western Iraq, has barely caused a stir in Iraq and much of the Arab world – where U.S. troops are reviled as brutal invaders who regularly commit such acts.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki broke his public silence on the incident Tuesday, saying the killing of civilians wasn’t justified and cautioning coalition troops to show more care.

Al-Maliki, speaking in a television interview with the British Broadcasting Corp., also expressed his remorse over the killings
“We emphasize that our forces, that multinational forces will respect human rights, the rights of the Iraqi citizen,” al-Maliki said. “It is not justifiable that a family is killed because someone is fighting terrorists, we have to be more specific and more careful.”

While Arab media have largely ignored allegations of brutal Marine misconduct in Haditha, a few have issued highly critical comment and said that the November events in the small Euphrates town northwest of Baghdad were neither the biggest alleged atrocity by U.S. forces nor would they be the last.

The pan-Arab daily Asharq al-Awsat, for example, focused on the role of the Western media in exposing the claims of misconduct by U.S. troops.

“As soon as I read the news, the immediate question that came to mind was: ‘Why wasn’t the tape broadcast by an Arab channel or published in an Arab newspaper?”‘ asked Diana Mukkaled in the newspaper’s Sunday edition.

Mukkaled referred to a videotape shot by an Iraqi journalism student and later obtained by Time magazine that showed the bodies of women and children, some in their nightclothes.

Reports of what happened in Haditha didn’t surface until March when the incident began to be seriously investigated. The Associated Press reported on them in an in-depth story in March 2006 which included accounts from people in the town who said they were witness to the slaughter.

But for now, renewed U.S. interest in the alleged Haditha massacre has only drawn a muted response from the media in Iraq.

It appeared to be roughly the case too elsewhere in the Arab world.

The state-run media in Syria, whose anti-U.S. regime is thought to be fomenting violence in Iraq by allowing foreign fighters to use its territory to enter Iraq, only carried a report from the Syrian Arab News Agency that, in turn, quoted British newspaper reports on the killings.

The daily Al-Thawra carried the agency’s report with the headline: “Marines deliberately killed children in Iraq.”

In the Gulf region, an oil-rich swath of mainly desert terrain whose rulers are longtime Washington allies, the media reported the killings but without editorial comment.

However, Dawood al-Shirian, a prominent Saudi commentator and a TV talk show host, said other regional issues, like the Fatah-Hamas rivalry in Palestinian territories, could have overshadowed the Haditha killings.

“But this issue cannot be hidden for long,” al-Shirian told the AP. “Sooner or later, it will come to the surface.”

The alleged killings, according to Lebanese rights activist Maan Bashour, may not have been the worst atrocity committed against Iraqi civilians, but undoubtedly the ugliest.

“This crime shows that the American administration did not only fail politically, militarily and financially (in Iraq) but has specifically failed morally.”

The incident, which could eventually set in motion the largest war crimes prosecutions of the Iraq war, already has prompted two U.S. investigations – one into the deadly encounter itself and another into whether it was covered up. The Marine Corps had initially attributed 15 civilian deaths to a car bombing and a subsequent firefight that left eight insurgents dead.

What happened in Haditha remains unclear. Rep. John Murtha, a Pennsylvania Democrat and decorated war veteran, said a Marine was killed when a bomb hit a military convoy. Angered by the loss of a comrade, the Marines shot and killed unarmed civilians in a taxi at the scene and went into two homes and shot the occupants, who included women and children.

“Who covered it up, why did they cover it up, why did they wait so long?” asked Murtha, a former Marine and prominent critic of Iraq policy. Interviewed on ABC’s “This Week.” Murtha said: “We don’t know how far it goes. It goes right up the chain of command.”

The incident was destined to become just another unfortunate episode in the three-year-old Iraq conflict until Murtha went public with his suspicions of an attempted cover-up.

It was believed likely that some of those involved could go on trial for murder, sullying the reputation of the U.S. Marines Corps.

Haditha is in Anbar province, a mainly desert region that stretches from just west of Baghdad to the Jordanian and Syrian borders. Its inhabitants are overwhelmingly Sunni Arabs and it has been the most dangerous part of Iraq for U.S. forces since their arrival in 2003.

Anbar’s communities maintain strong tribal links and are bitter critics of the post-Saddam order in Iraq, in which the Sunni Arabs lost dominance to the Shiites and Kurds, who combine for about 80% of Iraq’s 27 million people.