U.S. Accidentally Kills Kurdish Fighters in Iraq

Tweet This article makes you wonder about the article below, where civilians including that little baby in the picture, and other children were wounded or killed. They always say it was an accident or that they children were really insurgents. If they can so blithely and stupidly kill their own comrades, you know what is happening in these other cases. Linda

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Feb. 9 — An American helicopter apparently fired on friendly Kurdish pesh merga fighters by mistake, killing as many as nine people.

The attack took place early today in the northern city of Mosul, when the helicopter attacked a guard post overlooking the offices of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, the party of Iraq’s president, Jalal Talabani.

The attack stunned officials of the party, who said that their base and the surrounding guard posts were well known to the American military.

“Everybody knows that it is a P.U.K. base, and is used for protecting the main road between Mosul and Erbil,” said Kabir Goran, a senior party official. He said the guard post that was attacked was about half a mile from the headquarters. “We have daily contacts with the Americans, and they have been to the base,” he said.

The American military command in Baghdad said the helicopter crew thought it was attacking the hideout of an Al Qaeda bomb-making cell. The command said the strike killed five Kurds, described as policemen; Kurdish officials said nine were killed.

The Kurds and their 200,000-strong pesh merga militia are crucial allies of the United States in Iraq. They live mainly in the mountainous northeastern part of the country, but their area of control extends west to the Tigris River and to Mosul, a city of close to 2 million. Kurds dominate the eastern half of the city, Sunni Arabs the western half.