WASHINGTON - September 1, 2011 - According to a diplomatic cable published by WikiLeaks, U.S. troops massacred an Iraqi family in the town of Ishaqi in 2006, handcuffing and then murdering 11 people by shooting them in their heads, including a woman in her 70s and five children aged five or less.
McClatchy is reporting that the soldiers then called in an air strike on the house to cover up evidence of the killings.
This account differs sharply from an official version of the 2006 incident, which indicated that coalition forces captured an al Qaeda operative in the house, which was destroyed in a firefight. However, the WikiLeaks cable corroborates accounts by Ishaqi townspeople and includes questions about the incident by Philip Alston, the U.N.'s special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions.
The cable is dated twelve days after the incident, which took place March 15, 2006. In it, Alston says that autopsies performed in Tikrit on bodies pulled from the wreckage of the farmhouse indicated that all of the dead had been handcuffed and shot in the head.
The victims included "at least 10 persons, namely, Mr. Faiz Hratt Khalaf, 28, his wife Sumay'ya Abdul Razzaq Khuther, 24, their three children, Hawra'a, 5, Aisha, 3, and Husam, 5 months old, Faiz's mother, Ms. Turkiya Majeed Ali, 74, Faiz's sister (name unknown), Faiz's nieces, Asma'a Yousif Ma'arouf, 5, and Usama Yousif Ma'arouf, 3, and a visiting relative, Ms. Iqtisad Hameed Mehdi, 23, (all of whom) were killed during the raid."
