US commander: Violence down in Baghdad
Updated: 2007-09-20 19:41
Jabir said the Americans began yelling to disperse the vehicles, then opened fire as the cars were trying to turn around.
"Some people, including women and children, left their cars and began crawling on the street to avoid being shot but many of them were killed. I saw a 10-year-old boy jumping in fear from one of the minibuses and he was shot in his head. His mother jumped after him and was also killed," Jabir said, adding that his car flipped over in the chaos.
The incident has angered Iraqis, uniting them in blaming American forces for the violence ravaging their country and backing the government's announcement to ban Blackwater from Iraq.
American and Iraqi officials announced they would form a joint committee to try to reconcile widely differing versions of the incident. Conflicting accounts were circulating among Iraqi officials themselves.
Land travel by US diplomats and other civilian officials outside the fortified Green Zone was suspended following the Iraqi government order that Blackwater stop working.
The US-based company is the main provider of bodyguards and armed escorts for American government civilian employees in Iraq and banning it from Iraq would hamper and make movement of US diplomats and others difficult.
Al-Maliki, who disputed Blackwater's version of what happened, spoke out sharply against the company Wednesday, saying the government would not tolerate the killing of its citizens "in cold blood."
He also said the shootings had generated such "widespread anger and hatred" that it would be "in everyone's interest if the embassy used another company while the company is suspended."
Eager to contain the crisis, the State Department said Wednesday a joint US-Iraqi commission will be formed.
The size and composition of the commission have yet to be determined but its members are charged with assessing the results of both US and Iraqi investigations of Sunday's incident, reaching a common conclusion about what happened and recommending possible changes to the way in which the embassy and its contractors handle security, the State Department said.
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