"One witness, Aws Fahmi, heard his neighbour, Yunis Salim Khafif, plead for his life in English, shouting: “'I am a friend, I am good.'”
“'But they killed him, his wife and daughters,'” Fahmi said."
From the London Times via Antiwar.com--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From another story about Haditha in the San Francisco Chronicle
[text omitted]
Reporters who embedded in Haditha several months before the alleged massacre said Marines considered the town as enemy territory, with frequent roadside bombings. During patrols inside the city, Marines treated inhabitants like terrorists, raiding their homes.
An Associated Press journalist who traveled in Haditha last June with a Marine unit not involved in the November killings saw a Marine urinate on the kitchen floor of a home and on another occasion saw insults chalked in English on the gate of an Arab home. The reporter asked a Marine commander about the incident and was told it would be investigated.
Last August, the British newspaper The Guardian reported that Haditha was under the control of religious extremists who enforced their own strict interpretation of Islamic law — including decapitations of people suspected of collaborating with the Americans.
"'This is a war in which the distinction between killing the enemy and massacring civilians is not always completely obvious,'" said John Pike of GlobalSecurity.org. "'Counterinsurgency operations are particularly prone to the killing of people who, in retrospect, are judged to have been innocent civilians, but who in the heat of battle seemed to be the enemy.'"
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