San Jose Mercury News (California) April 07, 2003
Mistaken airstrike leaves 18 Kurds dead
By Mark McDonald, Ken Dilanian and Jessica Guynn; Mercury News
In the latest ''friendly fire'' episode of the Iraq war, American planes apparently fired by mistake on Kurdish guerrillas and U.S. special-forces soldiers Sunday, killing at least 18 Kurds and injuring about 80 people.
Four Americans also were believed to have died in the attack. U.S. officers from the 173rd Airborne Brigade at Bashur airfield in northern Iraq said U.S. special-forces soldiers were killed, but gave no details.
Despite Sunday's incident, friendly-fire deaths are lower than they were during the 1991 Persian Gulf War, Pentagon officials and defense analysts said.
''This campaign has yielded fewer friendly-fire deaths,'' said Air Force spokesman William Bodie, than other conflicts ''in military history, given the intensity of the war and the intertwining of so many coalition forces.''
The U.S. Central Command said in a brief statement about Sunday's incident: ''Coalition aircraft were conducting close air-support missions at the time, and were in coordination with ground forces. The circumstances contributing to the incident are under investigation.''
Among those killed was a translator for the British Broadcasting Corp., Kamran Abdul Razzaq.
Wagih Barzani, the Kurdish special-forces commander and the younger brother of the powerful Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani, was critically injured. He was flown by helicopter to Bashur airfield, where he was treated and evacuated to a military hospital in Germany. He was in stable but serious condition with a shrapnel injury to the brain, said Lt. Col. Harry Stinger, commander of the 250th Forward Surgical Team.
The incident occurred near Dibakan, a town recently liberated by Kurdish guerrillas about 30 miles southeast of Mosul, Iraq's third-largest city.
About 18 vehicles in the U.S. and Kurdish convoy, including military transports and journalists' vans, were headed to Dibakan when the commander of the U.S. team reportedly called in an airstrike. It was believed he had seen an Iraqi tank that had targeted the convoy.
BBC ''World Affairs'' editor John Simpson, who was in the convoy, said he saw two U.S. F-14 jets come in low. What followed, he said, was ''every type of horror'' as vehicles and bodies burned around him. Razzaq, the BBC translator, died of blood loss after losing his legs in the bombing.
''I saw the bomb coming out of one of the planes, just one bomb, and then extraordinarily I saw it as it came down beside me,'' Simpson said. ''It was painted white and red and it crashed into the ground about 10 yards from where I was standing.''
Several of the vehicles had been carrying ammunition and rockets, which exploded in fires caused by the bombing. TV footage showed a dozen burned, twisted hulks of cars and trucks.
Five British combatants have been killed and dozens of U.S. soldiers injured by friendly fire, the military's term for accidental attacks on its troops. The U.S. military is still investigating the combat deaths of nine Marines near An-Nasiriyah on March 23.
The toll is lower than it was in Afghanistan, where at least 47 allied soldiers were killed in friendly-fire incidents, including four Canadians who were killed when a U.S. Air National Guard F-16 missed its target.
A U.S. Army War College study in 1995 estimated that between 13 percent and 24 percent of U.S. combat casualties in the 20th century were killed or wounded by comrades. Experts say it is nearly impossible to prevent casualties caused by human or mechanical error on the dispersed and chaotic modern battlefield.
This war is even more conducive to friendly-fire casualties, said Andrew Krepinevich Jr., a defense strategist with the independent Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, because forces are ''spread out in little pockets and islands in different parts of the country.''
Such incidents are a regrettable but inevitable cost of war, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said last week. ''There has been friendly fire in every war in the history of mankind,'' he said. ''There are portions of this battle space that are enormously complex, and human beings are human beings and things are going to happen.''
But the bombing of Kurdish and U.S. forces 30 miles southeast of Mosul on Sunday led critics to question whether the Pentagon has done enough to reduce the risk.
''It is puzzling that a dozen years after the gulf war highlighted friendly-fire casualties, the Pentagon has still not implemented a high-tech combat identification system for ground forces,'' said John Pike, a defense analyst with Global Security.org.
Concern over friendly-fire deaths soared during the Persian Gulf War, when 24 percent of the 146 American soldiers who died were killed by fellow soldiers, one of the highest percentages in modern warfare. The Pentagon last year scrapped technology designed to avoid friendly-fire deaths because it was too costly, Pike said.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Copyright © 2003, San Jose Mercury News
