A U.S.-Iraqi night raid results in the deaths of eight civilians weeks after U.S. combat operations were announced as over.

16 Sept 2010 | InfoShop News

A joint U.S.-Iraqi counterterrorism operation outside of Fallujah on Wednesday was reported by Janine Zacharia at The Washington Post as “the deadliest incident involving U.S. troops since the United States declared an end to its combat operations in Iraq on Aug. 31″.

Iraqi and U.S. officials differed on their head-counts of civilian casualties, but it’s another clear “indication that the U.S. War in Iraq is not over: they are still killing civilians”, Jason Ditz wrote at AntiWar News.



“Iraqi officials said eight civilians were killed, while the U.S. military said four suspected members of al-Qaeda in Iraq and two civilians died in a firefight,” Ms. Zacharia added, though: “Among the dead, they said, were a 70-year-old man and three of his sons, who were all asleep in their yard when they were killed by a grenade. A fourth son died at a hospital, the Iraqi officials said.”

Timothy Williams and Duraid Adnan reported at The New York Times: “Four of the dead were brothers between the ages of 10 and 18, according to the Iraqi police and residents of the area.”

The rationing of electricity has forced many Iraqis to sleep outside and the Iraqi forces said to be initiating operations are being widely regarded as violence-by-choice, rather than necessity, Mr. Ditz added:

Since post-invasion Iraq has near constant blackouts most Iraqis sleep outdoors in the summer to escape the heat.Provincial officials complained that neither the Americans, nor the Iraqi security forces involved in the attack informed them of the planned attack, and it seems there was little indication of any coordination. The Iraqi forces were said to have been part of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s office, a security force which has often come under fire for acting as a de facto private militia to Maliki. The attack is just the latest in a growing number of combat missions the U.S. troops have taken part in since the Obama Administration announced its fake end to the Iraq War earlier this month and claimed that all combat was over. It should be pointed out that in this case there doesn’t appear to have been any actual combat but just summary killings.

Ms. Zacharia is wrong to classify this as the “deadliest” event related to U.S. combat since the Administration’s re-branding of the war, though it has the resulted in the largest amount of civilian casualties.

In two previous incidents involving gunfire from U.S. troops, three were killed in a firefight earlier this week and twelve earlier in the month.

The Obama Administration renamed the U.S. effort in Iraq to “Operation New Dawn” last month after lowering the troop presence to under 50,000, including 4,500 U.S. Special Operations Forces for ‘kill or capture’ missions.