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New York TimesBAGHDAD, Oct. 12 — The American military said on Friday that it was vigorously investigating a Thursday evening airstrike on a stronghold of insurgent leaders northwest of Baghdad that also killed nine children and six women. The civilian toll is one of the highest to result from a single American military action since the beginning of the Iraq war.
Rear Adm. Greg Smith, an American military spokesman here, said the killings were “absolutely regrettable,” but blamed the enemy fighters for engaging American forces while using civilians as a shield.
“We do not target civilians,” the admiral said in an interview on Friday. “But when our forces are fired upon, as they are routinely, then they have no option but to return fire.”
The airstrike, near Tharthar Lake, a Sunni Arab region about 75 miles northwest of Baghdad, killed 19 senior-level insurgents with ties to Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia after insurgents first fired on a unit of American soldiers approaching a residential structure, the United States military said. Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia is a homegrown Sunni extremist group that American intelligence says is foreign led.
“A ground element came under fire from that building that we had to neutralize,” Admiral Smith said. It was not clear on Friday whether American commanders knew that so many civilians were in or near the structure when they authorized the airstrike....
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http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/13/world/middleeast/13iraq.html