US soldiers accused of shooting civilians in Sadr City

US soldiers were accused on Mar. 9 of opening fire on a car carrying a family in the Baghdad district of Sadr City, killing a man and his two young daughters and wounding his son. The allegations were made by the man's wife, Ikhlas Thulsiqar, who was in the car, and members of the Iraqi police, who were at the scene. The woman said her family had turned from an alleyway onto a main street guarded by US soldiers. Seconds later, she said, a fusillade of bullets ripped into the car. "They killed the father of my children! The Americans killed my daughters!" she sobbed, sitting crumpled on the floor of Imam Ali Hospital in Sadr City where rescuers had taken the victims, including her daughters, nine and 11, and her son, seven. The US military command said in a statement that it was investigating an episode in Sadr City involving "an escalation of force," but it could not confirm any details of the account given by the man's wife. "That is a serious allegation, and we'll take a look and figure out what happened," Lt. Col. Christopher Garver, a military spokesman in Baghdad, said. The deadly shooting appeared to be the first in the working-class district involving either the Iraqi or US military since a joint force of more than 1,100 US and Iraqi troops began a house-to-house search for weapons and militants there on Mar. 4. The episode had the potential to inflame anti-US sentiment in the neighborhood and reawaken the Mahdi Army, the Shiite militia that has largely controlled the district but has agreed to stand down to allow the sweep to take place. The military operation in Sadr City, part of an effort to pacify the capital by flooding the streets with security forces, has served as a test of a new, fragile relationship between the authorities and Moqtada al-Sadr, the Shiite cleric who controls the Mahdi Army and commands a vast following among poor Shiites. The military incursion followed protracted negotiations between representatives of Sadr, neighborhood leaders and government officials. Sadr vowed not to impede the crackdown in Sadr City or elsewhere, and privately ordered his fighters not to resist the military sweeps regardless of the level of provocation. But Sadr, a fierce nationalist who has long demanded a rapid US withdrawal from Iraq, has also complained publicly about the US involvement in the Sadr City operation. Local leaders, in turn, have also warned that a heavy-handed or prolonged US engagement in Sadr City might incite the residents and their militia to retaliate.