Seven Killed by American Fire As Iraq Lets US Troops Stay
BAGHDAD - Seven Iraqis, among them three women and a child, were on Tuesday reported killed by the US military, a day after Washington and Baghdad agreed to keep American forces in Iraq beyond 2008.
The deaths of more civilians come as Iraqis begin reassessing the controversial role of the US military in their war-ravaged country.
Iraqi security officials said three women and a man were killed when the minibus in which they were travelling came under American military fire in Baghdad’s northeastern Al-Shaab neighbourhood.
The vehicle was carrying employees of Al-Rasheed bank and the gunfire wounded another two people — a woman and a man, they said.
A US military spokesman told AFP US forces fired on a minibus in Baghdad “after the driver failed to heed a warning shot”.
“The bus was travelling on a street that is off-limits to vehicles other than passenger cars,” the spokesman said.
“Initial reporting indicates that two passengers were killed and four wounded. The incident is under investigation.”
In a separate statement the military said its troops opened fire on a car which tried to speed through a roadblock during an operation against Al-Qaeda in Iraq on Monday, killing a child and two men.
Two men in a vehicle sped towards the checkpoint and ignored warnings to stop while troops were conducting the operation in Baiji some 200 kilometres (140 miles) north of Baghdad, the statement said.
“The ground force fired warning shots, but the driver attempted to speed through the roadblock. Perceiving hostile intent, the ground force engaged, killing both men,” the statement said.
A wounded child was found inside the vehicle and was transferred to a military medical facility where he died, it said.
“We regret that civilians are hurt or killed while coalition forces work diligently to rid this country of the terrorist networks that threaten the security of Iraq and our forces,” said US military spokesman Commander Ed Buclatin.
According to the Iraqi Body Count website, which keeps an independent tally of Iraqi deaths, between 77,333 and 84,250 civilians have been killed since the US-led invasion of 2003.
US President George W. Bush and Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki agreed on Monday that they would begin negotiations early next year on the terms of an American military presence in the country beyond 2008, officials said.
The two leaders signed a non-binding statement of principles for the talks, setting a July 31, 2008 target date to formalise US-Iraq economic, political, and security relations.
Maliki announced in Baghdad on Monday that the accord sets 2008 as the final year for US-led forces to operate in Iraq under a United Nations mandate, which will be replaced by the new bilateral arrangement with Washington.
Iraqis on Tuesday blasted Maliki for signing the pact.
The hardline Sunni religious body, the Muslim Scholars Association, said the agreement gave the US a right to “kill, demolish and humiliate Iraqis.”
“This will provoke our people who will look at those who signed as collaborators with the occupier,” said the association, which is allegedly linked to several anti-American Sunni insurgent groups.
Sunni lawmaker Dhafir al-Ani said the agreement gives “the US a chance to interfere in different aspects of (Iraqi) life.”
Liwa Sumaysim, MP from the political group of anti-American Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, insisted that Maliki stick to his pledge that parliament have the final say on any deal reached with the US.
“We have strong reservations on the pact, although it is a non-binding one. The Iraqi parliament must have the final word on it,” he said.
Meanwhile, 13 people were killed on Tuesday in a spate of attacks north of Baghdad, security officials said.
A suicide bomber detonated his explosives-filled vest in front of police headquarters in the central city of Baquba, killing seven people, police said.
Two people were killed in mortar attacks on homes in Buhriz, south of Baquba, while one person was killed when a civilian car was hit by a roadside bomb in Dali Abbas, 40 kilometres (25 miles) northeast of Baquba.
In Tikrit, a civilian was shot dead in the city centre by unknown gunmen, while a policeman was killed when insurgents opened fire on a police patrol at Al-Hawijah, 50 kilometres (30 miles) west of Kirkuk.
A leader of the Ambagiyah tribe was shot dead by insurgents in the village of Ambagiya, 20 kilometres (12 miles) north of Baquba.
© 2007 Agence France Presse
The blame for this is obvious. Perfidy is a war crime, and a war crime terrorists and insurgents commit in spades. The reason its a war crime is that it generates a ‘fog of war’ that imperils non-combatants by combatants posing as non-combatants to their enemy.
That is unfortunate for the civilians, but they should have stopped when warning shots were fired. Despite his one incident of civilian casualties, the troop surge has reduced violence approx. 55% in Baghdad since last year. I have even spoken to friends of mine who are in Iraq on their 2nd and 3rd tours, and they say this trip it is very quite.
John Gault, if you think that failure to stop at a checkpoint justifies a summary execution, then I ask you to consider the converse of your statement: it’s unfortunate that American troops are getting killed, but they shouldn’t have invaded a sovereign country.
I suggest you point out to your military friends that their occupation of Iraq is illegal, and encourage them to disobey the orders of their criminally insane president.
It seems the media is intent on telling us violence is decreasing. What on earth is an acceptable level of violence? who gives a foreign nation the right to determine what an acceptable level of violence is on someone else’s soil. The people who were driving that van were in as much fear as the soldiers firing upon them. This is what makes occupation in an insurgency so deadly. Since we have been dumbed down by our media i would like to ask some questions that smarten us back up again. 1. Since we have discovered that Iraq has no nuclear or biological weapons,why can’t we withdraw? 2. If the reason that we cannot withdraw is we might be handing the country back to terrorists then may question is did they become terrorists pre or post Saddam? Since there was less wide spread violence pre-Saddam, don’t you think we made it worse post-Saddam. You get my drift. We need to withdraw from this madness.
compassion and Peace to all
John Gault … hmmmm, the name smells familiar. And bloodstained. Not “Galt”, is it?
As far as massud goes, the further and the quicker massud goes the better - so a vehicle containing passengers is not a passenger vehicle? So the US mass murderers were justified in opening fire upon unarmed civilians?
I swear we’re only breeding half-wits these days … US power won’t last for ever, and some time someone whose family survived the US military’s “kindnesses” and “tender mercies” may well be in a position to apply them to us.
I swear, we’re only breeding half-wits these days … if only that was all we did.
I will believe the violence has decreased when I hear it from some other source other than the right wing propaganda machine the US Military and the White House having running day and night! How many times have we been told the same set of lies in the last 5 years people??????? So many it defies counting. But, there are still those gullible fools like John Gault who buy the propaganda and refused to use their common sense. So, the same violence has always cropped up again. I will not believe the surge is working until violence stops completely and I see a peaceful Iraq. It usually takes a lot longer to snuff out a civil war once it’s taken a hold and the fire has been lit. I personally am more inclined to believe that it’s the calm before the storm again. We are seeing a brief respite the violence before it all starts up again in full force. If it isn’t still bad and we haven’t heard the truth from our ‘right wing’ media. I don’t see the violence ever stopping as long as the US Military insists on killing innocent civilian’s at the drop of the hat! As far as I can see that is what this is. All we have is the US version of what happened not the Iraqi version. And usually the Iraqi version is never the same as our version. There isn’t a thing that comes out of this Administration that even resembles the truth anymore. I will be greatly surprised if this ’surge working nonsense’ just isn’t more propaganda designed by Bush himself to get all the critic’s off his back and insure that he gets more tax dollars to work his ‘Axis of Evil’ plans. So he can invade Iran unhampered. I am sorry but I don’t buy any of it for a second!
Mossad, oops I mean massud, the blame for this is indeed obvious, and I think you know it but don’t want to admit to it. The blame lies with the US government and the neo-cons who plotted this illegal invasion of Iraq. They are the real war criminals and if there is any justice in this world they will be prosecuted for the atrocities being committed by US servicemen and women on their behalf. I suspect you also know that these so-called terrorists and insurgents would be more truthfully described as resistance fighters. What are they resisting? The answer is American style imperialism and the centuries of invasions by Western forces hell bent on gaining control of the middle east and wiping out Islamic government in order to install not democracy but capitalism.
One way to lie is to represent the truth as its opposite. It is not true, as the Western propaganda machine would have us believe, that “Islamists” are out to destroy the Western way of life. The truth is that corporate America and its capitalist allies want to destroy the Islamic way of life in order to install capitalist corporations in the middle east and to exploit its people for financial gain - this is made clear in the “Project for a New American Century”. Islam is not compatible with capitalism and that is why the neo-cons and the current US government and its allies want to destroy it (Israel has additional reasons). All this talk about bringing freedom and democracy to the middle east is just a smokescreen for their real agenda - global economic dominance through the use of military force. Do you really believe that Bush, Blair, and Howard give a damn about the rights and freedom of the Arabs? Their behaviour whilst in power clearly demonstrates they couldn’t care less about human rights. So cut the crap please, you’re not fooling anyone but the rednecks and Islamaphobes.