The US military gave a robust, no-apologies response yesterday to grief in Iraq and demands for an explanation as to why its forces attacked a village, killing up to 45 people, many of them said to have been attending a wedding. "How many people go to the middle of the desert 10 miles from the Syrian border to hold a wedding 80 miles from the nearest civilisation?" said Maj Gen James Mattis, commander of the US 1st Marine Division.
"There were more than two dozen military-age males. Let's not be naïve."
Asked about witness testimony and film broadcast by the Dubai-based Al Arabiya television which showed weeping relatives lowering bodies, one of a child, into graves, he said: "I have not seen the pictures but bad things happen in wars. I don't have to apologise for the conduct of my men."
The US insisted that its forces, including air-to-ground missiles, killed around 40 foreign fighters. But Iraqi police and witnesses said the attack killed dozens of innocent people, many of them women and children. Some said the bride and groom were also killed.
The incident happened before dawn on Wednesday at the village of Makr al-Deeb, near Qaim, close to the Iraq-Syria border. People who say they were guests told the Associated Press news agency that the wedding party was in full swing - with dinner just finished and the band playing tribal Arabic music - when US fighter jets roared overhead and US vehicles started shining their highbeams.
Worried, the hosts ended the party. Men stayed in the wedding tent and women and children went inside the house nearby, the witnesses said. About five hours later, the first shell hit the tent. Panicked, women clutching their children ran out of the house, they said.
Lieut Col Ziyad al-Jbouri, deputy police chief of Ramadi, the provincial capital about 70 miles west of Baghdad, said between 42 and 45 people were killed, including 15 children and 10 women. Mr Salah al-Ani, a doctor at a Ramadi hospital, put the death toll at 45.
Mr Mahdi Nawaf, a shepherd who attended the wedding, said his daughter and at least one of his grandchildren were killed.
"Mothers died with their children in their arms. One of them was my daughter. I found her a few steps from the house, her two-year-old son, Raad, in her arm. Her one-year-old son, Ra'ed, was lying nearby, his head missing," he said.
"Where are the foreign fighters they claim were hiding there? Everything they said is a lie."
The dead also included an Iraqi wedding singer and his musician brother. A cousin of Hussein al-Ali, a well-known singer from Baghdad, and of his musician brother, Mohamed, told Reuters they had been killed while sleeping after the wedding, at which they had performed.
Brig Gen Mark Kimmitt, deputy director of operations for the US military in Iraq, insisted US forces had targeted "a suspected foreign fighter safe house", 16 miles east of the Syrian border. "We took ground fire and we returned fire," he said. "We estimate that around 40 were killed. But we operated within our rules of engagement."
A poll due for release next week reveals a sharp drop in the number of Iraqis who view US troops as liberators - just 7 per cent compared to over 40 per cent six months ago.