Iraqis say tape is of wedding struck by U.S.
RAMADI, Iraq(AP) — The bride arrives in a white pickup and is quickly ushered into a house by a group of women. Outside, men recline on brightly colored silk pillows on the carpeted floor of a large tent. Boys dance to tribal songs.
The wedding scenes are on a videotape obtained Sunday by Associated Press Television News. The tape shows a party that attendees say was attacked by U.S. aircraft last week. The U.S. military, however, says the target of the attack was a safe house used by militants.
Up to 45 people died in the attack in the village of Mogr el-Deeb, about 5 miles from the Syrian border. The military is investigating the matter, but it says all evidence indicates that the target was not a wedding.
"There was no evidence of a wedding: no decorations, no musical instruments found, no large quantities of food or leftover servings one would expect from a wedding celebration," Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt said Saturday. "There may have been some kind of celebration. Bad people have celebrations, too."
But video footage that APTN shot at the targeted site Thursday, a day after the attack, shows fragments of musical instruments amid pots and pans scattered around a bombed-out tent.
The wedding videotape, shot by a cameraman who was said to have died in the attack, shows a dozen white pickups speeding through the desert escorting a bridal car decorated with colorful ribbons. The bride wears a Western-style gown and veil.
A water tanker truck can be seen in both the video shot by APTN and the wedding tape, which was obtained from a cousin of the groom. An AP reporter and photographer who interviewed more than a dozen people a day after the attack identified many of them as being on the wedding party video.
The video shows singing and dancing at an all-male tent set up in the garden of the host, Rikad Nayef, for the wedding of his son, Azhad, and the bride, Rutbah Sabah. The men move to the porch when darkness falls. Children, mainly boys, sit on their fathers' laps; men smoke an Arab water pipe, finger worry beads and chat with one another. No women can be seen, but people at the party said they danced to the music of Hussein al-Ali, a Baghdad wedding singer hired for the festivities. He was reported killed in the attack.
Depicted on the video is a stocky man with short hair playing an electric organ. Another tape, filmed a day later in Ramadi and provided to APTN, shows the musician lying in a burial shroud.
The AP talked to wounded Iraqis in Ramadi, about 250 miles west of the attack site, who said they lost family members in the attack. They said several children were killed.
Kimmitt said U.S. troops who swept through the area found rifles, machine guns, foreign passports, bedding, syringes and other items that suggested the site was used by foreigners infiltrating from Syria. He said U.S. soldiers who arrived at the site after the attack did not find evidence of any children having been killed, although a "handful of women" — perhaps four to six — were "caught up in the engagement."
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