US troops open fire on protestors

The shooting took place last night in the town, 30 miles west of the capital. Col Arnold Bray of the US 82nd Airborne Division, who gave the American account of the incident, could not confirm the Iraqi deaths.

But Dr Ahmed Ghanim al-Ali, director of Fallujah General Hospital, said there were 13 dead, including three boys under the age of 11.

He said his medical crews were shot at when they went to retrieve the injured, which he said numbered 75.

Local residents said the demonstrators were mostly youngsters aged between five and 20, but Bray insisted that some of them were armed.

“Ask them which kind of schoolboys carry AK-47s,” he said.

He said some people in the crowd had opened fire on the school building where his troops were based, but the Arab television station Al-Jazeera quoted residents as saying the Americans opened fire after someone threw a rock at the school.

The demonstrators were reportedly protesting against the presence of US troops in their town.

Residents said the shooting continued for at least a half an hour.

Edtesam Shamsudeim, 37, said her 45-year-old brother died in the gunfire. She was shot in the leg and her husband was wounded.

“We were sitting in our house. When the shooting started, my husband tried to close the door to keep the children in, and he was shot,” she said at the hospital, sitting with a bandaged leg and some of her children around her.

Their clothes were stained with bloody hand-prints. “Americans are criminals,” she said.

Officials at US Central Command in Qatar had no immediate comment.

Outside the school today, people chanted for US forces to leave Iraq. “Go go USA!” they said in Arabic, adding in English at the end: “Go away!”

Townspeople said today’s demonstration was to ask the soldiers to leave the occupied school so that classes, due to resume today, could take place.