Hellfire for the enemy

Washington Post:

"The city looks like a bucket of Legos dumped out on the ground," the 26-year-old pilot said. "It's brown Legos, no color. It's really dense and hard to pick things out because everything looks the same."

He uses a powerful lens to zoom in on tiny silhouettes, trying to identify people with "hostile intent" among hundreds of ordinary citizens in Baghdad.

In recent weeks, Katzenberger and other pilots have dramatically increased their use of helicopter-fired missiles against enemy fighters, often in densely populated areas. Since late March, the military has fired more than 200 Hellfire missiles in the capital, compared with just six missiles fired in the previous three months.

The military says the tactic has saved the lives of ground troops and prevented attacks, but the strikes have also killed and wounded civilians, provoking criticism from Iraqis.

On Wednesday, eight people, including two children, were killed when a U.S. helicopter opened fire on a group of Iraqis traveling to a U.S. detention center to greet a man who was being released from custody, Iraqi officials said.

The U.S. military said in a statement that it had targeted men linked to a suicide bombing network. "Unfortunately, two children were killed when the other occupants of the vehicle, in which they were riding, exhibited hostile intent," the statement said.

U.S. officials say they go to great lengths to avoid harming civilians in airstrikes.

"It's not Hollywood and it's not 110 percent perfect," said Col. Timothy J. Edens, the commander of the 12th Combat Aviation Brigade, of the accuracy of his unit's strikes. "It is as precise as very hardworking soldiers and commanders can make it. These criminals do not operate in a clean battle space. It is occupied by civilians, law-abiding Iraqis."

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The story drifts into complaints about non combatant casualties, but it does not put the blame where it belongs on the enemy who camouflages himself as a non combatant. These blatant violations of the Geneva Conventions are the proximate cause of virtually all civilian casualties in Iraq yet the media generally ignores enemy violations.

Instead they focus, like the Post does on the occasions when the enemy's failure to wear a uniform and his use of civilian shields causes harm to civilians. It is just terribly unfair reporting, but it is also pretty typical reporting for this war. These attacks on the enemy save both US and Iraqi lives and they have been important to defeating the Iranian proxy forces in Iraq.