On 'Complicated Battlefield,' U.S. Troops Raid, 3 Civilians Die

While the mass killing of about two dozen villagers at Haditha continues to draw headlines, the more troubling killing of individual civilians by U.S. troops remains a more common occurence. These incidents often are never explained, and rarely witnessed by American reporters, who are growing fewer in number in Iraq and not often on patrol with soldiers due to the dangerous conditions.

However, one of the most intrepid of all the U.S. reporters over the past few years, Tom Lasseter of Knight Ridder, has filed a new report based on a mission he went on last Thursday just south of Baghdad where he monitored the killing of three civilians, a woman and two men, under the usual fog of confusion.

Lasseter was co-winner of an Overseas Press Club award earlier this spring for his Iraq reporting.

The raid, led by a unit of the 2nd Brigade Combat Team of the U.S. Army's 4th Infantry Division, was aimed at a compound of houses, purportedly holding about 17 people and the one man they sought, and insurgent leader suspected of orchestrating roadside bombs that had killed American soldiers. In the town, Mussayib, a suicide bomber killed almost 100 hundred people last year.

The Americans were ordered to avoid shooting unarmed civilians, and Lasseter observes how hard it is for them to tell friend from foe in patrolling "a very complicated battlefield. ... where there are Sunni Muslim insurgents who kill U.S. soldiers, Shiite militiamen who kill Sunni families, Sunni insurgents who kill Shiite Muslim families, and an assortment of smugglers and criminals. "

Last Thursday's mission "would serve as a reminder that counterinsurgency is among the most complex forms of warfare, and sometimes the wrong people are killed," he writes.

Lasseter would sit nearby with Air Force Staff Sgt. Justin Cremer as he monitored the raid on a video feed to a computer screen, where it looked like a video game. The reporter described what happened next:

"The radio crackled with a report of one shot fired, then a second, third and finally a fourth. Soldiers called in as they cleared rooms of the seven houses. They'd come in expecting about 17 people; there were 27.

"Time passed. Cremer kept watching the screen. The radio squawked: Two men and a woman were dead. The details were vague. A soldier had seen the woman and said he thought she had a rocket-propelled grenade launcher on her shoulder."

"A sergeant's voice boomed over the radio: 'I need to know what the (expletive) that rocket (expletive) ended up being.'

"Cremer called in for illumination rockets, and the white balls bounced in the air, turning night to day. The soldiers didn't find a rocket-propelled grenade or its launcher. They scoured the compound and found only two AK-47 assault rifles, common in Iraq.

"The insurgent leader wasn't there. The soldiers detained a man who intelligence reports suggested was an associate."

Lasseter reveals that the following day, the captain who led the Army unit said he would have to return to the compound to give the family compensation payments for the woman and probably for the two men as well (if it could be determined they were not insurgents). The captain said he wasn't looking forward to the trip.

His superior told Lasseter "there would be plenty more missions to come -- bringing the chance to stop insurgents who've killed and maimed innocents, but also bringing the risk of killing the innocents themselves."

The complete story can be found here.