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.
When Sunni Arab insurgents overran police
stations in western Mosul in late 2004, the under-strength American brigade
assigned to the city concentrated its own troops on the more dangerous western
side of Mosul while pesh merga militiamen took over security for much of eastern
Mosul. Kurdish officials say the pesh merga, many of whom operate under the
titular authority of the Iraqi Army, remain the largest security force east of
the Tigris River.
The American command released a statement today
saying that, after observing armed men at a bunker, American troops fired
warning shots and called out in Arabic and Kurdish for the men to put down their
weapons.
A helicopter then “observed hostile intention,” and fired on the bunker. The
military statement did not describe specifically what the helicopter crew saw
the Kurdish troops do.
But it did say that American ground troops were
fired on from the bunker at the time of the helicopter attack.
Kurdish officials said that, in addition to the men who were killed, six pesh
merga fighters were wounded, and that some of them were cared for by American
troops after the fighting ceased.
Mulla Bakhtyar, another senior P.U.K. official,
said the party has demanded an investigation. “We are sad and upset,” he said.
A pesh merga fighters who said he was a
survivor of the attack told a Kurdish television channel that the fighters at
the bunker did not fight back against the American troops “so we wouldn’t be
considered terrorists — we did not even shoot a bullet.”
There have been accidental attacks on pesh
merga fighters before, according to Mahmoud Othman, an influential Kurdish
member of the Iraqi national assembly. But he said that they have not caused
frictions between Kurdish and American forces, and he predicted that today’s
incident would not do so either.
“Many of these things have happened in the past
four years — it’s quite unfortunate,” Mr. Othman said. “But I don’t think it
will seriously affect any relations.”
