ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - Twenty people were reportedly killed on Thursday in southern Iraq’s Babil province, according to family and security sources, who differ on the perpetrator of the murder. Security forces who raided the house have said civilians were killed by the man they were seeking, but a family member told Rudaw that the security forces killed the man along with members of his family.
The sister of Rahim Kazem al-Ghurairi, the wanted man accused of killing his extended family in his house in the al-Rashayed village in Babil, told Rudaw on Friday that security forces had killed the family rather than him, among them children.
"They sent 50 hummers yesterday, and in self-defense, clashes occurred with the security forces," Ghurairi’s sister, who introduced herself as Umm Hussein, which translates to Hussein’s mother in Arabic, said.
His sister explained that security forces were sent to their house by Ghurairi’s brother-in-law due to some family issues.
Iraqi Security Media Cell on Friday said that “indiscriminate fire” met security forces after they surrounded the house on Thursday, adding they will open an investigation after finding “a number of the corpses of citizens in a house.”
They noted that details of the incident will be issued once further investigations are concluded.
Umm Hussein denied that her brother, whom she said was a farmer, had killed his family or that he was wanted by security for terrorism or drug-related charges, saying “20 people died” in bullet fire from heavy weapons, appealing to the Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi to hold them accountable.
Iraqi state media (INA) quoted the leadership of Babil operations on Thursday as saying that security forces had “carried out a duty in the Jableh area against wanted persons who were hiding in a house whose owner shot the security forces, wounding two members.”
"A security force from the SWAT forces, with judicial approval, surrounded the house, whose owner refused to surrender, and after the security force managed to enter the house, it found that all of his family, who numbered 20 civilians, were martyred while inside the house,” INA added.
Babil’s governor, Hassan Mandil al-Saryawi denounced the incident in a statement on Friday, saying that authorities were “closely following up with judicial and security authorities,” and announced the formation of an investigative committee to “reveal the reasons that led to this massacre, stressing that the real criminal will receive the appropriate punishment for such a tragedy and will not escape punishment.”
The governor in a press conference on Friday added that the man was wanted by Baghdad province and had an arrest warrant according to Article 406 of the Iraqi penal code which concerns punishments for premeditated murder, but was not wanted by Babil governorate.
Sources from AFP provided a different number of the total victims, with a member of the Iraqi security forces said that a wanted man “killed at least 12 members of his extended family, many of them children, before committing suicide.”
AFP also cites an anonymous intelligence source as saying that the suspect was part of the Islamic State (ISIS) group. ISIS were declared territorially defeated in 2017 after seizing control of vast swathes of land in 2014, but remains a security threat in Iraq.
Additional reporting by Halkawt Aziz
Updated at 3:05 pm
