Guerrillas Kill 3 GIs
US Accidentally Kills 8 Kurdish Policemen
Reuters reports on political violence in Iraq on Friday.
Three US GIs were announced killed by enemy fire in al-Anbar Province.
In the southern port city of Basra, guerrillas set off a roadside bomb that killed one British soldier and wounded 3 others.
*Guerrillas in the northern city of Mosul set off a roadside bomb that wounded 17 persons, among them 10 policemen.
*Car bombs killed or injured in Hilla (south) and Kirkuk (north)
*The US air force trying to hit a Salafi Sunni cell instead killed eight Kurdish Peshmerga militiamen and wounded 6 others. They were serving in Mosul's police force.
Another US air strike at Arab Jbour near Baghdad killed eight persons and destroyed a building. The air strikes were in response a request from US ground troops, who apparently were put in some difficulty by the guerrillas.
Al-Hayat reports in Arabic that Sadr al-Din al-Qubanji, a major prayer leader in Najaf and a figure close to Abdul Aziz al-Hakim of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, criticized Iranian influence in Iraq and called on Tehran and Washington to avoid turning his country into "an arena of contestation" between them.
Al-Hayat also says that the 1920 Revolution Brigades (also known as the Islamic Resistance Movement) refused to join the "Islamic State of Iraq" coalition or "al-Qa'eda and its allies on the other side. The US has called on the group to enter talks with Washington.
posted by Juan Cole @ 2/10/2007 12:46:00 AM
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3 Comments:
NY TImes article about Iran and Roadside Bombs makes it look like the most serious cause of US casualties are the Iranian explosives provided to Shiite militias. I thought that most of the road side bombing was done by the sunnis.
But what the article reveals indirectly is the intensity with which the Pentagon is persuing this issue as if its a key factor in the horrible situation we have in Iraq.
Arms must be pouring into Iraq from every direction. The populations in almost every country in the Middle East and many elsewhere have a intense dislike of America and its actions in Iraq. Bush and his fellow travelers are always giving Iran veiled threats of a military attack, so why would Iran consider the US troops in Iraq a benign presence. Being the poster child of preemptive war we can't get too touchy when threatened countries try to take a piece out of us.
The Times article is totally reminescent of the pre-war WMD articles - uncritically reporting Pentagon and administration "Chicken Little" revalations.
MOSUL - A U.S. air strike killed eight Kurdish Peshmerga militiamen and wounded six others in Mosul, Kurdish officials said, describing the incident as apparent friendly fire. The U.S. military said it killed five armed men during a raid targeting an al Qaeda cell. The men turned out to be Kurdish police, the U.S. military said.
I heard another detail not in this wrapup.
"In the North of Iraq, helicopter gunships called in by the Iraqi military on insurgents in a bunker… turms out to be Kurdish police. 5 killed by friendly fire, 6-8 wounded."
[ Source]
If this is true, Reuters is doing a little bit of unwitting (?) disinformation work by not reporting that the peshmerga were killed by Iraqi "friendly Fire" (What an obscene oxymoron)
I've made no attempt to verify that detail.
If the US knew of a Salafist cell in Mosul, why didn't they simply inform the Kurds and let them take care of the problem? The Kurdish special forces in Mosul are reasonably professional and can handle these sorts of operations better than any other Iraqi units. I would argue, in fact, that they can probably conduct these operations with far less risk to Muslawi civilians than the US. If we are ever to extricate ourselves from Iraq, we need to stand back and allow the Iraqis to do the fighting. Our inability to trust the Kurds in instances of this sort is puzzling and disheartening.
Instead, we unnecessarily and foolishly killed eight of our best allies. The grieving families were shown on Zagros and KurdSat TV and now Kurds in Turkey, Iran and Iraq all get to see evidence of US incompetence. The Bush Administration has pretty much run out of credibility in Kurdistan, although residual goodwill toward America remains. But people here in Kurdistan are confused and angered by this sort of incompetence.
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