Human Rights Watch has urged Iraqi authorities to give a government committee charged with probing a deadly raid by security forces on a protest camp last week greater financial and political backing to investigate who is responsible for what it described as an apparently unlawful use of lethal force. On Saturday, the group also said it received photos from a separate, parliamentary investigation allegedly taken in the aftermath of the attack that showed the bodies of several men lying in the protest area amid burning cars. Some have their hands bound and “appear, because of the way the bodies are positioned, to have been executed with gunshots,” the group said. The April 23 action against the Sunnis in Hawija who were protesting against the Shia-led government unleashed a backlash of deadly attacks by Sunnis, and battles between gunmen and security forces that have claimed more than 250 lives. Before the Hawija crackdown, local and tribal officials had been trying to negotiate a peaceful end to a standoff between protesters and security forces. Authorities had wanted to enter the camp to hunt for weapons and make arrests related to an earlier incident in which a nearby checkpoint came under attack. Iraqi forces opened fire only after they were attacked, according to the Defense Ministry. It said 23 people, including three members of the security forces, were killed in the clashes. It said “only insurgents and extremists remained” in the camp before it moved in, and that some of the dead included fighters with ties to al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein’s outlawed Baath Party. The Defense Ministry has said security forces opened fire only after they came under attack while trying to make arrests. Hours after the raid, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki ordered the creation of a ministerial committee to investigate the incident. A parliamentary committee is also probing what happened at Hawija.
