May 26, 2004 journal, wedding party massacre, victims of this war are the survivors on both sides because they will never forget or have any peace anymore than a mother that has aborted her child will never have peace in this life because of the guilt they always feel. I quote from an article on rense.com/general 53/onebyone.htm "U.S. soldiers started to shoot us one by one. Survivors describe wedding massacre as Generals refuse to apologize By Rory McCarthy in Ramadi. The Guardian-UK 5-21-4. The wedding feast was finished and the women had just led the young bride and groom away to their marriage tent for the night when Haleema Shihab heard the first sounds of the fighter Jets screeching through the sky above. It was 10.30 p.m. in the remote village of Mukaradeeb at the Syrian border and the guest hurried back to their homes as the party ended. As sister-in-law of the groom, Mrs. Shihab, 30, was to sleep with her husband and children in the house of the wedding party, the Rakat family villa. She was one of the few in the house to survive the night. "The bombing started at 3:00am," she said yesterday from her bed in the emergency ward at Ramadi General Hospital, 60 miles West of Baghdad. "We went out of the House and the American soldiers started to shoot us. They were shooting low on the ground and targeting us one by one", she said. She ran with her youngest child in her arms and her 2 young boys, Ali and Hamza, close behind. As she crossed the fields a shell exploded close to her, fracturing her legs and knocking her to the ground. She lay there and a second round hit her on the right arm. By then her two sons lay dead. "I left them because they were dead", she said. One, she saw, had been decapitated by a shell. I fell into the mud and an American soldiers came and kicked me. I pretended to be dead so he wouldn't kill me. My youngest child was alive next to me". Mrs. Shibab's description, backed by other witnesses, of an attack on a sleeping village is at odds with the American claim that they came under fire when targeting a suspected foreign fighter safe house. She described how in the hours before dawn she watched as American troops destroyed the Rakat villa and the house next door, reducing the buildings to rubbish. Another relative carried Mrs. Shihab and her surviving child to hospital. There she was told her husband Mohammed, the eldest of the Rakat sons, had also died. As Mrs. Shihab spoke she gestured with her hands still daubed red-brown with the henna the women had used to decorate themselves for the wedding. Alongside her in the ward yesterday where 3 badly injured girls from the Rakat family: Khalood Mohammed, age just a year and struggling for breath, Moaza Rakat, 12, and Iqbal, 15, whose right foot doctors had already amputated. By the time the sun rose on Wednesday over the Rakat family house, the raid had claimed at least 42 lives, according to Hamdi Noor al-Alusi, manager of the al-Qaim General Hospital, the nearest to the village. Among the dead were 27 members of the Rakat extended family, their wedding guest and even the band of musicians hired to play at the ceremony, among these Hussein al-Ali from Ramadi, one of the most popular singers in Western Iraq. Dr. Alusi said 11 of the dead were women and 14 were children. "I want to know why the Ameri-cans targeted this small village", he said by telephone. "These people are my patients. I know each one of them. What has caused this disaster?" Despite the compelling testi-mony of Mrs. Shihab, Dr. Alusi and other wedding guests, for U.S. military, faced with apparent evidence of yet another scandal in Iraq, offered an inexplicable different account of the operation. The military admitted there had been a raid on the village at 3 a.m. on Wednesday but said it had targeted a “suspected foreign fighter safe house”. “During the attack, coalition forces came under hostile fire and close air support was provided”…lie.