U.S. Accidentally Attacks Kurdish Outpost, Killing Several

It's been a bad few weeks for the United States with regards to friendly fire. Firstly it has been on the back foot defending itself from its airforce shooting a British soldier and withholding video evidence (luckily the gutter press of Britain - The Sun Newspaper, somehow managed to obtain the video). There is also the case of the US soldier waiting for trail for the fatal shooting of an Italian intelligence agent at a checkpoint in Baghdad and who can foregt the death of Pat Tillman and the way his death was dealt with. These are just a few cases where many soldiers have died because of friendfly fire and now there is another one...

Taken from The New York Times, February 10, 2007
By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr. and DAVID S. CLOUD

An American military helicopter killed as many as nine Kurdish militia fighters early Friday in the northern city of Mosul when the aircraft mistakenly attacked a guard post.

The guard post protected the local offices of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, the political party of the Iraqi president, Jalal Talabani. The attack stunned Patriotic Union officials, whose leadership and militia are close allies of United States 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 P.U.K. base and is used for protecting the main road between Mosul and Erbil,” said Kabir Goran, a senior Patriotic Union official, who added that the guard post was less than a mile from the party offices. “We have daily contacts with the Americans and they have been to the base.”

An aide to Mr. Talabani said he had asked the American military for information about the mistake.

The United States command in Baghdad said American troops erroneously believed that they had identified insurgents near the hide-out of a bomb-making cell linked to Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. The command said the strike killed five Kurds, described as policemen; Kurdish officials said as many as nine were killed.

Also on Friday, an insurgent group that has taken credit for several recent downings of United States helicopters released a video that it said showed a missile shooting down the Marine CH-46 Sea Knight transport that crashed Wednesday, killing all seven on board.

But Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute, a senior officer on the joint staff at the Pentagon, told reporters in Washington on Friday that early indications suggested that mechanical failure had caused the CH-46 crash; he warned against “drawing conclusions from things that are posted on the Internet.”

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

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

An American helicopter then “observed hostile intention” and fired on the guard post. The military statement did not describe specifically what the soldiers saw the Kurdish troops do. But it said that as the helicopter attacked, American ground troops took fire from the bunker.

Kurdish officials said six other pesh merga were wounded, some cared for later by American troops.

In the video posted on the Internet by a group calling itself the Islamic State of Iraq, the Sea Knight helicopter, distinctive for its two large rotors atop either end of its long, tube-shaped fuselage, is flying toward 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 senior defense 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. “It does not show the wingman flying anywhere near the CH-46,” the official said.

The helicopter crash, into an open field near the insurgent-heavy town of Karma, between Falluja and Baghdad in Anbar Province, was the latest of a half-dozen crashes or downings of aircraft over the past three weeks. Military officials are concerned that insurgents have devised new tactics or obtained new equipment that makes American aircraft more vulnerable.

Military investigators suspect that a shoulder-fired missile may have played a role in bringing down an American AH-64 helicopter on Feb. 2, according to a Pentagon document describing possible causes of the recent crashes.

Officials said there had not been a final determination of the cause of the AH-64 crash; no further details could be learned about the evidence suggesting a missile attack. The document noted that the helicopter also might have been struck by fire from a heavy-caliber machine gun.

General Lute said that four of the six helicopters that crashed recently were brought down by enemy fire, but that there was no “definitive evidence that there were missile attacks involved” in any of them. He added that it was too soon to say that attacks on helicopters had increased or that insurgents had adopted more effective tactics.

In addition to the Feb. 2 crash, those brought down by insurgents include a UH-60 that was hit by ground fire on Jan. 20 in Diyala Province; another AH-64 that was shot down near Najaf, on Jan. 28; and a Bell 412 helicopter belonging to an American contractor that was brought down south of Baghdad on Jan. 31, the document said.

Richard A. Oppel Jr. reported from Baghdad, and David S. Cloud from Washington. Reporting was contributed by Yerevan Adham from Iraqi Kurdistan, and Ali Adeeb, Qais Mizher and Ahmad Fadam from Baghdad.