Enemy's use of human shields causes civilian deaths in IRaq

NY Times:

The American military said on Friday that it was vigorously investigating a Thursday evening airstrike on a stronghold of insurgent leaders northwest of Baghdad that also killed nine children and six women. The civilian toll is one of the highest to result from a single American military action since the beginning of the Iraq war.

Rear Adm. Greg Smith, an American military spokesman here, said the killings were “absolutely regrettable,” but blamed the enemy fighters for engaging American forces while using civilians as a shield.

“We do not target civilians,” the admiral said in an interview on Friday. “But when our forces are fired upon, as they are routinely, then they have no option but to return fire.”

The airstrike, near Tharthar Lake, a Sunni Arab region about 75 miles northwest of Baghdad, killed 19 senior-level insurgents with ties to Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia after insurgents first fired on a unit of American soldiers approaching a residential structure, the United States military said. Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia is a homegrown Sunni extremist group that American intelligence says is foreign led.

“A ground element came under fire from that building that we had to neutralize,” Admiral Smith said. It was not clear on Friday whether American commanders knew that so many civilians were in or near the structure when they authorized the airstrike.

“The enemy has a vote here,” Admiral Smith said, “and when he chooses to surround himself with civilians and then fire upon U.S. forces, our forces have no choice but to return a commensurate amount of fire. Which is what they did last evening.”

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Admiral Smith has given the explanation that the Times should have known when it first started reporting this story. It is how the enemy operates. The deaths were the result of enemy war crimes and there is zero chance that the UN will seek an indictment. Fortunately most of the perps were killed in the attack. Still the Times needs to do a better job of focusing on enemy war crimes. The Times also continues to give its bogus description of al Qaeda's operation in Iraq.

Later in the story, it appears that the weapons of two missing soldiers were found in an enemy weapons cache. It does not indicate where the weapons were found. The search for these soldiers was delayed because of Democrat concerns about the enemy's privacy in their internet communications.