I saw the heads of my two little girls come off
An Iraqi mother in a van fired on by US soldiers says she saw her two young daughters decapitated in the incident that also killed her son and eight other members of her family … US soldiers at an earlier checkpoint had waved them through. As they approached another checkpoint 40km south of Karbala, they waved again at the American soldiers. “We were thinking these Americans want us to be safe,” Hassan said through an Army translator at a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital set up at a vast Army support camp near Najaf. The soldiers didn’t wave back. They fired. “I saw the heads of my two little girls come off … my girls – I watched their heads come off their bodies. My son is dead.” … Hassan’s father, in his 60s, wore his best clothes for the trip through the American lines: a pinstriped suit. “To look American,” Hassan said.
Apparently, it’s all to do with “killboxes“, or free-fire zones. The Pentagon designates areas of Iraq as a killing zones according to some internal logic of search and destroy. Any civilians within a killzone have an extremely high chance of being killed by Americans if they are moving outdoors, as several hundred residents of Hilla can attest.
Meanwhile, the bombings will continue until the regime “changes”. I note that the Pentagon now feels it can target apartment blocks with umpunity once they say they think Saddam Hussein may have been there.
A young woman’s severed head and torso and a small boy’s body were pulled Tuesday from a smoking crater carved into the earth by four U.S. bombs … But there was no sign of the man those bombs were aimed at: Saddam Hussein. One thing was all too clear, though: once again, civilians had suffered. When the broken body of the 20-year-old woman was brought out torso first, then the head her mother started crying uncontrollably, then collapsed. She was helped into a car by two male relatives … Acting on an intelligence tip, coalition forces attacked at about 3 p.m. Monday, turning the three homes into a 60-foot-deep crater. At least 20 other houses and nearly two dozen nearby shops were damaged … An elderly man’s body was found Monday night. On Tuesday, rescuers recovered the small boy’s body, and that of the 20-year-old woman. The bodies were placed in blankets and quilts and put on the sidewalk.