BAGHDAD — U.S. troops mistakenly killed six members of Iraq’s security forces Monday, Iraqi officials said, further straining relations between the U.S. military and the Iraqis they are paying to secure the country.
The predawn confusion in Mizrafa, a stretch of farmland along the Tigris River north of Baghdad, claimed the lives of two Iraqi police officers and four members of the Awakening, a group of mostly Sunni fighters who work with the U.S. military, said Iraqi Army Maj. Mohammed Younis.
A U.S. military spokeswoman said the shooting was under review.
“It is always regrettable when incidents of mistaken fire occur on the battlefield,” Staff Sgt. Stephanie Boy wrote in an e-mail.
The incident took place when U.S. troops aboard a boat on the Tigris approached a patrol of Awakening fighters, who were already on high alert because a suicide bomber had attacked the leader of the local group in nearby Tarmiyah, killing one person and wounding four others.
“They heard a rumor that al-Qaeda was going to stage an offensive against their town from the river,” Younis said, referring to the Sunni insurgent group al-Qaeda in Iraq. “They deployed themselves along the river waiting to ambush al-Qaeda if they started to attack.”
When the boat approached, the Awakening fighters fired warning shots because they could not determine whether the vessel was manned by Americans, Younis said. He said the troops on the boat did not shoot back, but an Apache helicopter later opened fire on the Iraqi forces, killing the police officers and Awakening members and wounding 10 Iraqis.
The U.S. forces were in the area conducting operations against al-Qaeda in Iraq, Boy said.
The shooting comes at a delicate time in negotiations between Iraq and the U.S. over a security pact governing the presence of U.S. troops in the country.
In other developments, the Iraqi Cabinet this week voted to reopen Abu Ghraib prison as a facility for holding criminals, with part of it set aside as a museum. Located on the western edge of Baghdad, the facility was once used to torture and execute enemies of Saddam Hussein and then became the site of U.S. prisoner abuse.
The museum will be divided into two parts: one devoted to crimes under Hussein and the other focused on abuses by U.S. troops, said Ali al-Obeidy, the head of the prisons section in the ministry of labor and social affairs.
