BAGHDAD, 1 July 2006 — US soldiers may have raped an Iraqi woman and murdered her and three members of her family, including a child, US military officials said yesterday.
Confirming another major investigation into alleged killing and abuse of Iraqi civilians by at least three US troops, one officer said the incident in March just south of Baghdad had initially been blamed on insurgents active in the area.
The probe is the latest in a series in recent weeks since the revelation of investigations into the killings of 24 people at Haditha in November. Commanders are cracking down on rogue soldiers in a bid to regain the trust of ordinary Iraqis and of their new government after three years of growing resentment.
Officers said a criminal probe was launched on June 24 into whether soldiers killed four people in their home at Mahmudiya on March 12. Police in the district said they could not recall a case meeting the description given by the US military.
Maj. Gen. James Thurman, the commander of the Baghdad area, ordered the army’s Criminal Investigation Command to mount the full investigation within a day of two soldiers coming forward, the military said in its brief initial statement.
“We’re not going to leave any stone unturned,” US military spokesman Maj. Todd Breasseale said in Baghdad.
In Washington, an army official said the suspicion was that two soldiers from the 502nd Infantry Regiment, later seen with blood on their uniforms, had raped a young woman and then one of them had killed her and three of her family, among them a child. The soldiers also allegedly burned the body of the woman. At least one other soldier was being investigated.
The suspected killer had been discharged from the army and was in the United States. Officials have said in similar cases that discharged soldiers can be recalled to face court martial.
In another development, Iraqi rebels have rejected Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki’s reconciliation plan, a top Sunni Arab leader said yesterday, as Al-Qaeda supremo Osama Bin Laden vowed to press on with jihad until victory. A leader of the influential Sunni Muslim Scholars Association dismissed Maliki’s plan as little more than “a campaign of public relations for the government.”
The plan which Maliki announced on Sunday in a bid to stem the sectarian violence ravaging Iraq’s Sunni and Shiite communities was “meaningless because he has excluded everyone,” Muthana Hareth Al-Dhari told AFP.
Yesterday, an Internet-posted voice message confirmed by the US as from Bin Laden paid tribute to the network’s leader in Iraq, Jordanian-born Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi who was killed in a US airstrike on June 7.
“We will keep up our fight to bleed your money dry, kill your men and so that (your forces) go home defeated, as we defeated you in Somalia,” Bin Laden told US President George W. Bush. “The banner of jihad has not fallen. It will be picked up by another lion of Islam,” he said in the message.
Meanwhile, the governor of the Iraqi province where Zarqawi was killed called in the army after clashes between Sunni and Shiite fighters north of Baghdad yesterday, police and his office said. But Defense Ministry spokesman denied receiving a request to dispatch army units to Muqdadiya in Diyala province, an ethnically mixed area where sectarian violence has deepened in recent weeks. The US military said US-led forces killed three insurgents and captured four in clashes that began on Thursday in the nearby village of Khairnabat, where police and witnesses said Shiite militias had attacked Sunnis fleeing the town.
