Survivors describe horror of US checkpoint shooting

Surviving members of an Iraqi family whose van was riddled with bullets by US troops said they were heading for Allied lines because they thought an air-dropped leaflet had advised them to flee their home.

Bakhat Hassan said US troops had waved the family car through one checkpoint as they left their village on Monday, The Miami Herald reported today.

But at the next checkpoint, the American soldiers opened fire.

“We were thinking these Americans want us to be safe,” the 35-year-old Iraqi said from his hospital bed through a translator.

He said 11 members of his family were killed – his daughters aged two and five, his son aged three, his parents, two older brothers, their wives and two nieces aged 12 and 15.

His wife Lamea, who is nine months pregnant, said she saw her children die.

“I saw the heads of my two little girls come off,” 36-year-old Lamea said. “My girls, I watched their heads come off their bodies. My son is dead.”

US officials had originally said seven people were killed in the shooting, and a Washington Post reporter at the scene put the death toll at 10.

Hassan’s father died later at the Army hospital. A brother who is being treated there may also not survive, doctors said.

Another brother, a sister-in-law and a seven-year-old child returned to the site to bury the dead.

The soldiers who opened fire on the family were following orders not to let vehicles approach checkpoints, US officials said.

Troops in the area were on edge after an Iraqi army officer posing as a taxi driver killed four soldiers in a suicide attack near Najaf on Saturday.

The Hassans had decided to make the journey after an American helicopter dropped fliers over their village showing a drawing of a family sitting at a table, eating and smiling, with a message written in Arabic.

Sgt 1st Class Stephen Furbush, an Army intelligence analyst, said the message read: “To be safe, stay put.”

But Hassan said he and his father thought it just said: “Be safe.”

To them, that meant getting as far away as possible from the helicopters firing rockets and missiles.

“A miscommunication with civilians,” said a US Army report written on Monday night.

The family of 17 packed into its 1974 Land Rover. Hassan’s father drove. In his 60s, he wore his best clothes for the trip through the American lines: a pinstriped suit.

“To look American,” Hassan explained.

They planned to go to Karbala. They stopped at a US Army checkpoint on the northbound road near Sahara, 25 miles south of the city, and were told to go on, Hassan said.

But “the Iraqi family misunderstood” what the soldiers were saying, Furbush said.

A few miles later, a Bradley Fighting Vehicle came into view. The family waved as it came closer. The soldiers opened fire.

Hassan remembers an Army medic at the scene of the killings speaking Arabic.

“He told us it was a mistake and the soldiers were sorry,” Hassan said.

“They believed it was a van of suicide bombers,” Furbush said.

Hassan and his wife were lying in beds next to each other in the green Army hospital tent near Najaf.

He had staples in his head. She had a mangled hand and shrapnel in her face and shoulder.

“It would be better not to have the baby,” Lamea Hassan said. “Our lives are over.”