Corps sacks three commanders
April 07, 2006
Corps sacks three commanders
Battalion under investigation in deaths of 15 Iraqi civilians
By Gidget Fuentes and John Hoellwarth
Times staff writers
Three officers — including an infantry battalion commander and two of his company commanders — were fired April 7 for “lack of confidence,” a Corps spokesman said. Relieved were Lt. Col. Jeffrey Chessani, who commanded the Camp Pendleton, Calif.-based 3rd Battalion, 1st Marines; India Company commander Capt. James Kimber; and Kilo Company commander Capt. Luke McConnell, said 2nd Lt. Lawton King, a spokesman for 1st Marine Division at Camp Pendleton.
Officials previously have confirmed that Chessani’s battalion was under investigation for an alleged Nov. 19 rampage by the battalion’s Kilo Company Marines in the Iraqi city of Haditha that left 15 civilians dead, including seven women and three children.
The civilian deaths occurred after a roadside bomb killed one of 3/1’s Marines during a combat patrol.
The decision to relieve the three officers was made by Maj. Gen. Richard Natonski, 1st Marine Division commander, “due to lack of confidence in their leadership abilities stemming from their performance during a recent deployment to Iraq,” King said.
Lawton did not explicitly connect the Haditha investigation to the firings but said the “decision was motivated by multiple incidents that occurred throughout the entire deployment.”
He referred questions pertaining to any other investigations of incidents to the military’s press center in Iraq, which couldn’t be reached before press time.
The firings came one week after the battalion returned home from Iraq and after the typical four-day liberty pass upon a deployment’s end.
Lt. Col. Phillip Chandler has taken command of the battalion, King said.
The Marine Corps won’t provide additional details on why the officers were relieved or whether anyone else has been implicated in the investigation.
“At this point, no charges have been preferred,” King said. “The investigation is still ongoing, so anything that pertains to this investigation we can’t talk about.”
A March 19 Time magazine article cited claims by local Iraqis that members of Kilo Company, 3/1, rampaged through the village killing civilians as they looked for insurgents responsible for the blast that killed Lance Cpl. Miguel Terrazas, 20, of El Paso, Texas, who was a member of Kilo, 3/1.
According to the Time article, Marines claimed they began receiving fire from a residential building after the roadside bomb exploded, which prompted them to assault a home where 9-year-old Eman Waleed lived with her parents, grandparents, two brothers, two aunts and two uncles.
The article describes Waleed’s account of the Marines entering her house and executing all the adults inside.
“The Marines also reported seeing a man and a woman run out of the house; they gave chase and shot the man,” the article reads. “Relatives say the woman, Hiba Abdullah, escaped with her baby.”
The day after the incident, a videotape made by a Haditha journalism student surfaced.
Time magazine acquired the tape through the Hammurabi Human Rights Group, which cooperates with Human Rights Watch. The magazine reported that the tape shows victims still in their pajamas and bullet-pocked walls spattered with blood.
The video, repeatedly aired by Arab televisions the day it surfaced, also showed bodies of women and children in plastic bags on the floor of what appeared to be a morgue. Men were seen standing in the middle of the bodies, some of which were covered with blankets before being placed in a pickup truck, according to the report.
Talal al-Zuhairi, who heads the Baghdad Center for Human Rights, said his organization feared that even if the military’s investigation implicated the Marines, they would not be punished severely enough, according to a March 22 report by the Associated Press.
According to the report, “this incident shows that the forces are committing, every now and then, operations that harm civilians,” al-Zuhairi said.
“What we are worried about today ... [is that] a U.S. soldier may be discharged from the military or jailed for two years,” al-Zuhairi said in the report. “This would in no way be sufficient punishment for wiping out a whole family or killing of a large number of people through an unjustifiable act.”
The magazine spent 10 weeks interviewing local residents affected by the incident and, in January, shared these accounts with military officials in Baghdad, accounts that directly conflicted with the Corps’ initial stance that the civilian casualties were the result of the insurgent attack.
Officials with Multi-National Corps-Iraq launched an investigation Feb. 14 after Time brought the allegations to their attention. Army Lt. Gen. Peter Chiarelli, commander of MNC-I, directed further review March 9 after he was presented with initial findings of the investigation.
Chiarelli then handed the findings to Marine Maj. Gen. Richard Zilmer, the new military commander for western Iraq.
Lt. Col. Bryan Salas, in a March 23 e-mail response to questions, said Zilmer directed the Naval Criminal Investigative Service to look into the allegations.
The Nov. 19 incident came one year after another high-profile incident that enflamed tensions between U.S. forces and Iraqis.
On Nov. 13, 2004, a corporal with 3/1 was videotaped shooting what appeared to be a wounded insurgent inside a mosque in Fallujah, Iraq, during the major U.S. operation to retake the city from insurgents.
Like the Haditha incident, the Fallujah shooting sparked outcries from human-rights groups regarding actions by U.S. forces against Iraqis.
Agents with NCIS investigated the matter, and the following May, Natonski ruled that the Marine would not face court-martial.
The Marine was never identified.
Ellie