The US army Saturday put down to its "war on terror" the deaths of civilians in a series of airstrikes in Baghdad and southern belts this week that also killed a senior Al-Qaeda leader in Iraq. "We regret when civilians are hurt or killed while coalition forces search to rid Iraq of terrorism," US military spokesman Major Brad Leighton told AFP.
Iraqi officials claimed that 13 civilians were killed in an air strike by American helicopters early Friday on a building in Baghdad's southwestern Dora district. Among the dead pulled from the rubble of a building in the Al-Saha neighbourhood of Dora were seven men, two women and four children, according to a medic at Baghdad's Al-Yarmuk hospital.
Reuters television footage from the hospital showed three men and two boys who had been injured in the strike. Doctors had amputated the left leg of one of the boys.
According to Leighton, the target of the air raid had been a group of men lobbing mortars into a belt of mixed Shiite and Sunni neighbourhoods north of Dora. "We targeted men firing mortars. Surveillance elements saw the group firing their weapons. Responding to this hostile action, coalition forces called for air support and engaged the men," he said.
"We do not know how many were killed or wounded, though we assess possibly two or three were killed or wounded. We were not able to get an accurate assessment because the bodies were recovered prior to the ground force arriving."
The US military on Thursday had declared an inquiry into claims by Iraqi police that five women and four children died in an air raid in Babahani, near the town of Musayyib, about 50 kilometres south of Baghdad, on Tuesday.
