In Cold Blood: Iraqi Tells of Massacre at Farmhouse

FOR WHAT NOBLE CAUSE

A cousin describes finding the shot and shattered bodies. A U.S. soldier is in custody.
By Raheem Salman and J. Michael Kennedy, Times Staff Writers
July 6, 2006

BAGHDAD — He was the first to enter the charred farmhouse where the bodies of his relatives lay strewn about the floor, shot and bludgeoned to death.

And he watched more than three months later as a U.S. Army officer took the two surviving children in his arms, barely able to hold back tears as he told them that the people who had killed their family would be punished.

"Never in my mind could I have imagined such a gruesome sight," Abu Firas Janabi said of the day in March when his cousin, Fakhriya Taha Muhsen; her husband, Kasim Hamza Rasheed; and their two daughters were slain and their farmhouse set ablaze.

"Kasim's corpse was in the corner of the room, and his head was smashed into pieces," he said. The 5-year-old daughter, Hadel, was beside her father, and Janabi said he could see that Fakhriya's arms had been broken.

In another room, he found 15-year-old Abeer, naked and burned, with her head smashed in "by a concrete block or a piece of iron."

"There were burns from the bottom of her stomach to the end of her body, except for her feet," he said.

"I did not believe what I was seeing. I tried to fool myself into believing I was in a dream. But the problem was that we were not dreaming. We put a piece of cloth over her body. Then I left the house together with my wife."

At least four American soldiers from a nearby checkpoint are the prime suspects. The case, which includes the alleged rape of the older daughter, has caused a firestorm in the United States and Iraq. And the soldiers, including one charged Monday with rape and murder, have become lurid symbols of the American military at its worst.

The image has not been helped in recent weeks by the emergence of other accusations that U.S. soldiers had killed Iraqi civilians.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki complained Wednesday that immunity from Iraqi prosecution had encouraged atrocities by American troops. And the U.S. military is clearly on the defensive. On Wednesday, Army Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, the chief military spokesman in Iraq, defended the troops here, complaining that the "acts of a few outweigh the deeds of many."

Janabi, who has emerged as a potential witness, has been interviewed by a U.S. investigator.

He lives about half a mile from the scene of the killings, just outside the town of Mahmoudiya. It's agricultural country, where the small farms are divided by mesh wire fences and the people who toil on them make a subsistence living.

Janabi and his wife were home March 12 when a neighbor ran to tell him that the farmhouse of his cousin and her husband was on fire and that he could see slain family members inside the burning building.

Janabi said that when he arrived at the house, he began to call for others to help him.

"But nobody came," he said in a telephone interview Tuesday from Mahmoudiya, describing the eeriness he felt as he and his wife stood there. "I felt that I had made a disastrous decision. I felt I had made a mistake to rush so quickly to the house, because if the murderers were still there, they would kill me as well."

He and his wife had to douse some of the flames before they could enter the home.

The couple had found the two young boys in the family crying as they stood outside the farmhouse, where they could see the bodies inside. The boys had been at school when the killings occurred but were home by the time Janabi and his wife arrived.

Together, they went to a checkpoint guarded by Iraqi soldiers to tell them what had happened. Then they went back to the house and watched as the bodies were placed in nylon bags and taken to a nearby Iraqi base.

Janabi said Abeer was not in school and, like other peasant girls, seldom left the house. But he said that three days before the killings, the Rasheed family was at his house and his cousin was complaining that the American soldiers at the nearby guard post were constantly searching her house. Janabi said the parents believed that the "girl was the target."

"I suggested they come and live in the house beside mine that was empty," Janabi said. "But they said, 'There are a lot of families close to us, and nothing bad will happen.' "

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