Probing Bloodbath

The Americans were soon shooting at Hiba's door. They entered and started rounding up family members. Hiba heard two shots, then her mother-in-law saying, "Oh my God." There were more shots and Rashid cried out, "They killed my mother!" Hiba tried to hush her husband, and heard an American soldier say to her father-in-law, "You, you." They shot him in the chest as he tried to stand, recalled Hiba, crying as she spoke into the camera. The soldiers were laughing and saying "OK" and "good" as they counted the bodies. Hiba says she saw her mother-in-law lying on the ground, with her hands raised in the air. The American soldiers, she says, shot the woman as she lay there.

The saddest and ugliest story was told to a NEWSWEEK reporter by a 12-year-old girl named Safa Younis. When the Marines entered her house that morning, she fled with her mother into a bathroom. A soldier followed them, shooting, she says. When the soldiers left, Safa tried to talk to her mother, but she was covered with blood. "Mama, Mama," cried the girl, until she realized that her mother was dead. So was her father, whom she found lying near the kitchen door. And her aunt, and her five siblings--all shot to death. "I was sorry for staying in the bathroom. I should have died like them," recalls Safa, who now lives with a cousin. "The Americans are murderers, criminals. They have no mercy."

The Americans directly involved in the Haditha incident are not talking. But a corporal who was on Kilo Company's civil- affairs team--the Marines who come in after the battle to deal with the civilians--offered NEWSWEEK a different, if far less complete version of events.

On the morning of Nov. 19, "the entire city was in an uproar," says Scott Jepsen, who was monitoring the radio back at Kilo Company's base in Haditha. Jepsen, who is now a sheriff in New Jersey, was on a team sent to do a damage assessment of Iraqi homes. The team later paid out money to civilians who had lost family members. It is common practice to compensate civilians or their families wounded or killed by American fire, up to $2,500 per civilian; at Haditha, the Marines handed out a total of $38,000 to relatives of 15 victims. Jepsen went through the houses entered by the Marines. He recalls talking to one resident, a divorce lawyer. "He wasn't showing much emotion," says Jepsen. "It was weird." Jepsen says the Iraqis they spoke to "knew that there were insurgents involved ... knew that there were some houses that let insurgents in." The former corporal insists that four men and a taxi driver gunned down as they fled a cab at the scene of the bombing were also insurgents. Locals told the Marines that the men were on their way to school, while Jepsen contends, "there was not one school open that day." (According to residents videotaped by the human-rights worker, the students were on their way to a technical college in Baghdad.) Jepsen says the Iraqi civilians are lying and covering up in Haditha. There were "no executions," he says.

The American top brass appears to suspect otherwise. A formal criminal investigation now underway may take months, but an investigation into a possible cover-up could produce results more quickly. Eager to avoid another Abu Ghraib, with its leaked photographs and stumbling official response, the Pentagon has brought in a big gun to investigate, Army Maj. Gen. Eldon Bargewell, a veteran Special Forces operator who once ran Delta Force and is known as a no-nonsense type. The thinking behind the investigation, said a senior officer on the Joint Staff, was, "Go fast, go senior, go independent."

Though no one is talking openly at Camp Pendleton, Marines and their families are buzzing about what might have gone wrong inside Kilo Company. The wife of a staff sergeant in the 3/1 battalion, who declined to be identified because she doesn't want to get her husband in trouble, told NEWSWEEK that there was "a total breakdown" in discipline and morale after Lt. Col. Jeffrey Chessani took over as battalion commander when the unit returned from Fallujah at the start of 2005. (Chessani's friends in his Colorado hometown defended him as a dedicated, patriotic, religious Marine.) "There were problems in Kilo Company with drugs, alcohol, hazing, you name it," said the woman. "I think it's more than possible that these guys were totally tweaked out on speed or something when they shot those civilians in Haditha."