The "Belmont Club" has been trying to piece together the truth of the "Wedding Party" massacre. Although he clearly wants to prove that Kimmet isn't lying, he's demonstrating serious intellectual honesty. He's carefully comparing competing stories and finding that there's a bit of truth in both. The dissonance is astonishing. This is reminding me more and more of a graduate history seminar, only this is no intellectual exercise.
Reader WEH sends this email from an American acquaintance in Iraq dated May 21, which may bear upon the story of the Wedding Party video.
"I can’t be absolutely sure what happened out there but if you know a few things about Iraq it doesn’t sound so outlandish. These people are members of a clan well known in Anbar province. They are supposedly "shepherds" but they are really more like livestock owners. The herds are large and the business is profitable. After the spring rains end, and they just did, these people and other clans like them follow the herds through the desert. They pick that time because the grazing is better. Along the way they have small houses in oases which serve as something between camps and residences.
They are also into smuggling. Mainly they smuggle livestock into Syria where the prices are better. Do they bring back guns and people? Probably. And it can’t be ruled out they may have been hired to slip some Syrians into the country. Whole families join this migration. And they do get married.
This afternoon a very popular Baghdad wedding singer was buried -- his family and the survivors say he was entertaining at the wedding. The reason so many women and children died is that as is tradition, the women and children sleep together, the men apart often in tents watching the stock.
Some of the people there had traveled from Ramadi for the wedding just as people travel to attend weddings anywhere. There's a romance in Arab culture about the desert. Some Americans get married by lakes or in mountains. The reason they returned to Ramadi, 250 miles away, is because that's the clan's base. And having been out there, there's very little between Ramadi and the Syrian-Jordanian border except a mosque-rest stop and Rutba. The US had Rutba sealed off.
They weren’t seeking medical attention. They brought the victims home to bury them in their version of [our family] cemetery. Ramadi is the "home" of all members of the Bou Fahad clan, which is the one of all the victims. There were at least a dozen children killed. One was decapitated. One little girl about [my granddaughter]'s age had holes all over her legs...and in her chest. One boy was missing half his face. Quite a place, Iraq.
If the wedding party victims are lying, they may be failing to mention that XXX-number of Syrian fighters were camped 100 meters down the road, or that they had rented the place to fighters two days before or something like that. My experience in these things has been that people wouldn’t be faking the deaths of their wives and children. The fact that there was a high proportion of women and children killed adds credence -- the kids sleep with the women and the men sleep separately."
This may start to explain the wonderment of some Belmont Club readers who have written to remark how the Associated Press account of the wedding video contrasts so strikingly General Kimmitt's version of events. One reader said, "they might be talking of two separate places". Or are they talking of one place and two separate buildings?
