IRAQ: Al Arabiya television said at least 41 civilians were killed yesterday in a US air raid on an Iraqi village celebrating a wedding.
The Dubai-based network, quoting eyewitnesses in the town of al-Qaim on the Syrian border, said the frontier village of Makr al-Deeb was attacked before dawn.
The US army admitted it killed around 40 people in an attack on suspected foreign fighters in Iraq near the Syrian border, but disputed reports that the victims were members of a wedding party.
Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, deputy director of operations for the US military in Iraq, said the attack early yesterday was within the military's rules of engagement.
Arabiya said the victims included women and children, and showed pictures of several shrouded bodies lined up on a dirt road.
Men were shown digging graves and lowering bodies, one of a child, into the pits while relatives wept.
"The US planes dropped more than 100 bombs on us," an unidentified man, who said he was from the village, told Al Arabiya. "They hit two homes where the wedding was being held and then they levelled the whole village.
No bullets were fired by us, nothing was happening," he added.
The US, which is facing a Shi'ite and Sunni Muslim insurgency in Iraq, says foreign fighters are entering Iraq from Syria.
In July 2002 a US air strike on an Afghan wedding party killed 48 civilians.
A report released by the US Central Command said the strike was justified because American planes had come under fire.
US officials say the abuses which occurred last October and November at Abu Ghraib involved about 20 detainees and were limited to a small number of soldiers.
The International Committee of the Red Cross and Amnesty International say they were more systematic and widespread.
Questioned by US senators, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage said control of military prisons would be handed to Iraqis as quickly as possible, but there was no timetable.
Washington says a sudden US departure from Iraq would risk bloodier anarchy in a country of religious and ethnic divides.
US-led forces are struggling against guerrillas, notably militiamen backing rebel Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.
Iraq's top Shi'ite religious leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who rarely makes public statements, called on Sadr and US-led forces this week to pull out of the holy cities of Najaf and Kerbala.
But Sadr appeared to be ignoring the call.
Hospital sources said at least eight Iraqis were killed and 14 wounded in renewed fighting in Kerbala year near one of Shi'ite Islam's holiest sites.
The clashes erupted as US tanks advanced near the shrine of Imam Hussein in Kerbala, one of several southern cities where Sadr's Mehdi Army militia rose up in a rebellion US forces have spent weeks trying to crush.
US warplanes launched strikes on the fringes of the city as tanks went within 50 metres of the shrine.
The shrine is ringed by a warren of narrow streets in which Sadr's fighters have taken refuge, witnesses said. - (Reuters)