| Ooops. Condolences to the families. |
The US military said the strike was launched after American ground forces spotted armed men in a bunker near a building they thought was being used to make bombs for Al Qaida in Iraq. The troops called out in Arabic and Kurdish telling the men to put down their weapons and also fired warning shots before the helicopters opened fire, the military said.
Five men later determined to be Kurdish police officers were killed and nine others were detained, the US military said, offering condolences to the families of those who died. Kurdish officials put the casualty toll at eight killed and six wounded.
A spokesman for the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, Azad Jundiyan, said the party realized the airstrike was a mistake. “We are allied with the coalition; it was a friendly fire incident, not an intentionally hostile act,” he said. Jundiyan identified the dead as peshmerga — Kurdish militiamen who once battled Saddam Hussein’s regime. Many peshmerga have been incorporated into the Iraqi army since the US-led invasion.