US ’friendly Fire’ Incident Kills Allies

A US military helicopter has killed as many as nine Kurdish militia fighters — allies of the US in Iraq — after the aircraft mistakenly attacked a guard post in the northern city of Mosul.

The post protected the local offices of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, the political party of Iraqi President Jalal Talabani.

The attack stunned Patriotic Union officials, whose leadership and militia are close allies of US forces. They said their base and the surrounding guard posts were well known to the American military in Mosul.

"Everybody knows that it is a PUK base and is used for protecting the main road between Mosul and Erbil," said Kabir Goran, a Patriotic Union official.

He said the guard post was less than two kilometres from the party offices. "We have daily contacts with the Americans and they have been to the base."

The US command in Baghdad said troops erroneously thought they had identified insurgents near the hide-out of an al-Qaeda bomb-making cell. The command said the strike killed five Kurds, described as policemen. Kurdish officials said as many as nine were killed.

"What the American statement said is not true," Mr Goran said. "They are trying to cover the massacre that they carried out at that military point."

News of the Mosul incident came as an insurgent group that has taken credit for several recent downings of US helicopters released a video that it said showed a missile shooting down the Marine CH-46 Sea Knight helicopter that crashed last Wednesday, killing all seven on board.

But Lieutenant-General Douglas Lute, a senior Pentagon officer, said early indications suggested that mechanical failure had caused the crash.

He warned against "drawing conclusions from things that are posted on the internet".

The helicopter attack in Mosul struck members of a militia force that is a crucial ally of the US. The Kurds and their fighters, known as pesh merga, live in mountainous north-eastern Iraq, but their control extends west to the Tigris River and Mosul. Sunni Arabs make up most of western Mosul, but Kurds dominate the eastern half.

In a statement, the US military command said that after observing armed men near the guard post, US troops fired warning shots and called out in Arabic and Kurdish for the men to put down their weapons.

The US helicopter then "observed hostile intention" and fired on the guard post. The statement said that as the helicopter attacked, US ground troops took fire from the bunker.

Kurdish officials said six other pesh merga were wounded, some cared for by US troops after the fighting.

In the video, posted on the internet by a group calling itself the Islamic State of Iraq, the Sea Knight helicopter is flying towards the camera. Then it banks hard right as if taking evasive action. After turning a half-circle, an object darts into the screen from the right, trailed by a curl of black smoke.

The object comes close to the helicopter, though no impact is visible.

But moments after the object enters the frame, an explosion rips through the helicopter, which drifts to the ground in flames.

A Defence official called into question the authenticity of the video, saying that a Cobra attack helicopter was close behind the Sea Knight in the moments before the crash, and that the Cobra pilot saw no sign of ground fire. The official also said the video appeared suspicious because there was no sign of the Cobra in any frame.

The helicopter crash, into an open field near the insurgent-heavy town of Karma, was the latest of half a dozen crashes or downings of aircraft over the past three weeks.

NEW YORK TIMES, WASHINGTON POST

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