Reply #58: US troops shoot indiscriminately at civilians, 7 killed [View All]

[IndianaGreen]

Meanwhile, new allegations of indiscriminate killings by U.S. troops surfaced Monday. Relatives and neighbors of seven civilians shot dead during a gun battle in a Baghdad neighborhood on Sunday said U.S. soldiers had stepped out of their vehicles and randomly fired at their car.

"The soldiers decided to kill everyone on the streets, and my mother was one of them," Mohammed Sabah al-Dulaimi, 19, an engineering student said in a telephone interview. "They were angry. There's no other reason for killing. They took revenge."

Dulaimi's mother, Suad Jodah Yaseen, was returning from work in a company car, which stopped some distance away from the scene where a roadside bomb had struck a U.S. military vehicle, according to her brother, Hadi Jodah Yaseen, 50.

"But random shooting by American soldiers hit her in the head and the chest, and one bullet pierced her chest and came out of the back," Yaseen said.

Lt. Col Barry Johnson, a U.S. military spokesman, confirmed that seven civilians were killed Sunday in Ghazaliyah, a volatile western Baghdad neighborhood where U.S. forces have bolstered their efforts to tame sectarian violence. But he said the civilians were caught in the crossfire of a gun battle between U.S. troops and insurgents.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/28/AR2006082800039.html