Brutal tactics in Iraq

The tactics of the US military in Iraq are outrageous, counter-productive and should not be happening. I’m referring to the latest report from Iraq in which the US military have killed 19 “suspected insurgents” and 15 women and children – the story is here: Iraq strike ‘kills 15 civilians’. Time and again the US military uses airstrikes and kills numerous civilians, rather than using their superior military strength to detain people on the ground.

In this latest incident the Americans said that a number of “suspected insurgents” were meeting somewhere in the Lake Tharthar region. Rather than arrest these people, and charge them with whatever they’re supposed to have done wrong, they are merely labelled as “suspected insurgents” and lethally targetted from the air, using several massive bombs. In the airstrike several (estimated at 15) civilians were killed. The tactic of airstrikes against so-called insurgents (in this case these people were described as “senior leaders of al-Qaeda in Iraq”) is very brutal, destructive, and counter-productive to the US mission in Iraq, which is surely to bring peace and some normality to this country. Can the Americans not see that these tactics are wrong for so many reasons; as the occupier of this country they should show more restraint.