Officials in Iraq's Kirkuk [2] province charge that twice in the last two weeks the US military violated the security agreement signed in November by attacking criminal suspects without coordinating with Iraqi forces. In the first episode last month, US soldiers fatally shot an Iraqi couple in their home near Kirkuk after the wife reached for a pistol hidden under a mattress, according to US and Iraqi accounts. The couple's 8-year-old daughter was wounded. The shooting was reported at the time, but the charges of failure to coordinate emerged on Feb. 6—hours after a US raid in which a 58-year-old man was shot dead outside Kirkuk. (NYT [3], Feb. 7)
See our last posts on US atrocities in Iraq [4] and the Status of Forces Agreement [5].
