U.S. friendly fire kills Kurds

BAGHDAD, Iraq – A U.S. airstrike accidentally killed eight members of a Kurdish security force and injured another six who were manning an observation point near a political office in the northern city of Mosul, Iraqi officials said Friday.

The U.S. military said that five, not eight, Kurdish police officers died in the attack, which it said had been aimed at bomb-makers affiliated al-Qaida.

A statement from the U.S. military said that U.S. troops had received intelligence that bomb makers connected to al-Qaida were operating in the Karama neighborhood of Mosul. Seeing armed men near a targeted bunker, ground forces fired warning shots and made several calls in Arabic and Kurdish for the men to lay down their weapons, the statement said.

As the men began shooting at the ground forces, a U.S. aircraft “observed hostile intention from the bunker and exercised proper self-defense measures in response to the assessed threat,” said the statement. It expressed “deepest sympathies to the families of those individuals killed.”

Kurdish officials reacted angrily, saying the airstrike on one of the main roads in Mosul was inexplicable.