u.s. military family killing

The Killing of an Entire Iraq Family by the US Forces of Occupation
2006-03-18 :: media bureau::iraqi league ::

The US forces of occupation killed eleven members of the Harat family, including six innocent children and four women in a rural cottage in Alsaffa village in Ales-haqi district near Samara. This is the latest in the US’s defunct ‘war of terror’; in this occasion, the US used hundreds of troops and latest lethal weaponry in its air assault on this poor family home. One of the children was only four months old!

The family neighbour Mohammed Almajma’ey describes the details of this crime as his tears fell. ‘At 1.30pm, the US occupation troops backed by helicopters attacked the family residence of Fa’is Harat, a teacher at the local primary school. After securing the family home, handcuffing its residents and subjecting them to beating; and controlling the surrounding residential area, the US occupation troops executed all family members which were Fa’is Harat himself, his wife, his three children, his sister along with her three children, his father, and female relative’, he went on to clarify that ‘the children were aged between 2 months and 6 years’.

He continued ‘after killing the family, the forces of occupation went on to plant explosives around the house and destroyed it whilst the victims laid dead inside’. Then, ‘they used their helicopters to bomb the place killing even the family livestock’.

Harat’s surviving sister, Om Mohammed, gave more details of who was executed as tears were flooding her face. ‘They even executed my mother Turkiah Majeed who was 90 years of age’ she said. They killed ‘my brother Fa’iz Harrat aged 27; his wife Sumayah Riziq aged 25; their three children Hawra’ aged 4 years, Aa’isha aged 2 years and Hosam aged only four months. They also executed my widowed sister Fa’isah Harat, who is also a primary teacher; and her two orphan children, Osama Yosuf aged 6 years, Asmaa Yosuf aged five, whose father was killed last summer by the US forces of occupation. They also killed Aziz Khalil aged 30 and Khateebah Nithal Mohammed aged 23, who were planning to be married next Thursday’.

She insisted that the children were machine-gunned after having being placed in one of the closets; whilst the rest were executed in adjacent room.

At the school where the two victim teachers had worked was overwhelmed with grief as the continued US crimes in Iraq had struck in the school’s heart this time. The 250 children at Ales-haqi Primary School wept from the deep grief felt because of the cold-blooded murder of their teachers. The children stayed home that day as a mark of respect and mourning of the dead murdered at the hands of the US forces.

One of the children, named Nawfal Abdullah, said his teacher Fa’is Harat used to drive him to school. ‘He was such a kind-hearted man, who loved Iraq very much’. Another of Fa’is’s pupils named Osama, who was taught by Fa’is for two and a half years and looked on to his teacher Fa’is as a father figure, chose not to talk about his sense of bereavement – he let his bitter tears do the talking instead.

Mohammed Almajma’ee, a work colleague of Fa’is Harat who shared with him many chats over lots of cups of tea, said ‘the school had lost one its best teachers’ as he watched his close friend being buried, and ‘Fai’s and his sister were good people’.

earlier story posted