Belmont Club

Wedding Party:

Belmont Club has a letter from a friend:

These people are members of a clan well known in Anbar province. They are supposedly "shepherds" but they are really more like livestock owners. The herds are large and the business is profitable. After the spring rains end, and they just did, these people and other clans like them follow the herds through the desert. They pick that time because the grazing is better. Along the way they have small houses in oases which serve as something between camps and residences.

They are also into smuggling. Mainly they smuggle livestock into Syria where the prices are better. Do they bring back guns and people? Probably. And it can’t be ruled out they may have been hired to slip some Syrians into the country. Whole families join this migration. And they do get married.

This afternoon a very popular Baghdad wedding singer was buried -- his family and the survivors say he was entertaining at the wedding. The reason so many women and children died is that as is tradition, the women and children sleep together, the men apart often in tents watching the stock.

Some of the people there had traveled from Ramadi for the wedding just as people travel to attend weddings anywhere. There's a romance in Arab culture about the desert. Some Americans get married by lakes or in mountains. The reason they returned to Ramadi, 250 miles away, is because that's the clan's base. And having been out there, there's very little between Ramadi and the Syrian-Jordanian border except a mosque-rest stop and Rutba. The US had Rutba sealed off.

They weren’t seeking medical attention. They brought the victims home to bury them in their version of [our family] cemetery. Ramadi is the "home" of all members of the Bou Fahad clan, which is the one of all the victims. There were at least a dozen children killed. One was decapitated. One little girl about [my granddaughter]'s age had holes all over her legs...and in her chest. One boy was missing half his face. Quite a place, Iraq.

If the wedding party victims are lying, they may be failing to mention that XXX-number of Syrian fighters were camped 100 meters down the road, or that they had rented the place to fighters two days before or something like that. My experience in these things has been that people wouldn’t be faking the deaths of their wives and children.

The accounts remain confusing after several days. Both sides are asserting their stories without relenting on any point, and both sides have presented visual evidence in their favor. It seems odd to give smugglers in al-Anbar an equal expectation of truth-telling with US General officers; on the other hand, the smugglers were there, the Generals weren't, and the visual evidence isn't decisive.

It is starting to look like the truth falls somewhere close to what this letter-writer describes: a desert camp, used by smugglers and livestock-traders, was also housing foreign fighters moving through to join the Iraqi insurgency. The attack appears to have been a carefully considered raid rather than a simple airstrike, which is suggestive that the site had been watched for a while beforehand by someone like the Special Forces, CIA SOG, or Marine Recon. Given the confident statements by US command elements, they probably filed equally confident reports requesting the raid, which targeted "two of twenty five structures in the village of Mukhradeeb by the Syrian border... [with] a combination of aerial ordnance, infantry assault and finally demolition charges."

If that is correct, what was not understood was the degree to which the camp was being used by desert clans, and not just insurgents. It is in some ways unsurprising that surveillence would not reveal that. We know that the tribal cultures in particular go out of their way to make women invisible and cloistered, which would drastically cut down on the ability of our spotters to get a sense of families being in the compound. What you could plausibly see from a hide site would be lots of men moving around; you should be able to ID the types of heavy weapons, if they were exposed to view at any point.

If they had that, plus some local intel that suggested this camp was being used to insert foreign fighters, that would be enough to justify the raid on military grounds. If the cultural predisposition to keeping the women hidden and indoors caused the recon team not to be aware that there were lots of women and children in camp, that's a tragedy but not an atrocity--a tragedy in which the tribesmen carry most of the blame, for having chosen to take money to smuggle in foreign fighters and weapons.

The US military is at fault only for not being able to see through walls, as they certainly would not have attacked a building full of women and kids if they had realized what was in it. We know the raid was discriminate because it attacked only the two structures in the camp. At last, there's little to do--assuming this overview is roughly correct--except to pay the diaya for the dead, and warn the tribes sternly against aiding our enemies. The only certain way to avoid such tragedies, in a culture that hides its women and girls, is not to allow your camp to be used by the enemy.