By Luke Baker and Alastair Macdonald
Baghdad - The United States military has said it killed around 40 people in an attack on suspected foreign fighters in Iraq near the Syrian border on Wednesday, but disputed reports the victims were members of a wedding party.
The attack occurred on a day when a US soldier was sentenced to one year in jail for abusing Iraqi prisoners and President George Bush prepared to deliver a keynote speech next week to stem slipping support at home and abroad over Iraq.
"We conducted an operation... against suspected foreign fighters in a safe house. We took ground fire and we returned fire," said Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, top US military spokesperson in Iraq.
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'They hit two homes where the wedding was being held and then they levelled the whole village' Kimmitt said the attack 25km from the Syrian border had been carried out within the military's rules of engagement and that Syrian passports, satellite communications equipment and a large amount of money had been found afterwards.
Dubai-based Al Arabiya television quoted witnesses as saying US warplanes had bombarded the village of Makr al-Deeb near the Syrian border while families were attending a wedding party, killing 41 people.
Arabiya said casualties included women and children and showed pictures of several shrouded bodies lined up on a dirt road. Men were shown digging graves and lowering bodies, one of a child, into the pits while relatives wept.
"The US planes dropped more than 100 bombs on us," an unidentified man, who said he was from the village, told the television station.
"They hit two homes where the wedding was being held and then they levelled the whole village. No bullets were fired by us, nothing was happening," he said.
'The situation will become more violent even after sovereignty' The United States, battling to stamp out guerrilla attacks in Iraq, says foreign fighters enter the country from Syria.
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