U.S. Officials Defend Raid Following Shiite Backlash

The pointed public request was a thinly veiled swipe at Interior Minister Bayan Jabr, who has ties to the Badr Organization, a Shiite group. On Monday, Jabr condemned the Sunday raid, telling al-Arabiya television that "innocent people inside the mosque offering prayer at sunset were killed," according to news services.

Jawad Maliki, an official with the Shiite Dawa party led by Shiite Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jafari, said the raid was "aimed to provoke a civil war for political purposes during a critical political period of the process of forming a government."

Maliki also accused U.S. forces of "killing this number of people after handcuffing and torturing them." Witnesses said U.S. and Iraqi forces stormed the building at about 6 p.m., just as evening prayers were beginning, and shot several unarmed worshipers and officer workers. No evidence was provided to substantiate those claims.

A visit on Monday to the site of the raid -- which local residents said was a former office complex converted into a community center, with a mosque, a school and an office of the Dawa party -- revealed inner and outer walls pockmarked by bullet holes.

Photographs of Sadr were plastered on walls. The floor was caked with dried blood. In one room a small crater pocked the floor, a sign of what witnesses described as a sound grenade.

Residents carried at least 21 coffins from the mosque at 11 a.m., some draped in Iraqi flags or black mourning banners, and loaded them into the backs of pickup trucks escorted by armed men chanting anti-American slogans. The coffins were said to be bound for the Shiite holy city of Najaf for burial.

Unlike the Shiite leaders, U.S. military and civilian officials kept a low profile Monday, leaving some commanders and diplomats, and their Iraqi supporters, frustrated that their version of events was not being disseminated.

"Someone should have said something. The other side is talking, and the American side is silent," said Mahmoud Othman, a Kurdish politician who works closely with U.S. officials. "To be silent here means you are on the weak side."

When they finally spoke out Monday night, U.S. commanders said that shots were fired from inside the compound and from surrounding buildings as soon as the soldiers arrived and that the Americans played mostly an advisory role. The lead unit, they said, was a special forces battalion known as the Iraqi counter-terrorism force.

"They were the drivers and the machine-gunners and the breachers," said Swindell, the lieutenant colonel.

He said the insurgent group based at the complex had been tracked for at least a month. He said he did not know if the group had a name, or what its religious affiliation was, but that members were believed to have tortured and killed at least three men belonging to the Iraqi counter-terrorism force.

About 50 Iraqi and 20 U.S. soldiers conducted the raid, Swindell said, adding that all but one or two of the slain insurgents were killed by Iraqi troops.

"There was nobody praying when we hit the objective, they were firing weapons at us," he said. "We had resistance the whole time, for about 45 minutes."

In a statement Monday, the U.S. military said 18 suspected insurgents were detained in the assault and three were wounded. The military also catalogued a large number of weapons found inside the compound, including 32 AK-47 assault rifles, two rocket-propelled grenade launchers and 12 "crush switch indicators" used to make bombs.

In a conference call with another general Tuesday night, Lt. Gen. Peter Chiarelli, commander of the Multinational Corps-Iraq , said the Iraqi soldiers had told U.S. troops the targeted building was not a mosque. He also said that footage aired on Iraqi television Sunday and Monday showing unarmed men lying dead and Korans scattered at the scene of the attack had been staged.

"After the fact, someone went in and made the scene look different from what it was," he said.

Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, an ethnic Kurd, said Monday he would lead a committee charged with reconciling the widely divergent accounts of the raid. If wrongdoing is discovered, he said, "We will take them before a court, whoever they are. Everyone who commits a crime should be punished."

Correspondent John Ward Anderson and special correspondents Omar Fekeiki, Bassam Sebti, K.I. Ibrahim and Saad al-Izzi in Baghdad and Dlovan Brwari in Mosul contributed to this report.