IRAQ: A friendly fire incident, in which an American bomb was dropped on a convoy of vehicles in northern Iraq, claimed at least 18 lives yesterday, including a Kurdish translator working with BBC correspondent Mr John Simpson, who escaped with slight injuries, writes Lynne O'Donnell, in Gwar.
A senior commander of the local Kurdish Peshmerga forces, Mr Wajih Barzani, brother of Kurdish leader Mr Massoud Barzani, sustained serious head injuries and has been airlifted to an American air force base in Germany for specialist treatment.
Another 44 Kurds, many of them in serious condition, were taken to local hospitals for treatment. Reports that four American soldiers who had been escorting Commander Barzani were also killed in the so-called "blue-on-blue" incident could not be immediately confirmed.
The incident appears to be have been the result of mistaken targeting by American fighter pilots who had been called in by ground forces and were attempting to bomb an Iraqi tank column that had appeared over a ridge about three kilometres southwest of the bombed site.
The bomb landed in the centre of an intersection where the convoy of about 11 jeeps had arrived only minutes earlier as guests of Commander Barzani, who had invited a group of international reporters to accompany him on a visit to the front line.
The target, however, was another intersection, which from the air would probably look identical to, and thus could easily have been mistaken for, the correct target.
The incident happened at 12.30 p.m. near the village of Dibaga, where a fierce front-line firefight between the Iraqis, who not long before had moved back a few kilometres, and the Americans, who had pushed forward, was in progress.
The scene on the road, which cuts through fields rich with the yellow flowers of oil seed plants, was transformed into one of utter devastation.
Pools of blood scarred the surface and clearly identifiable body parts were scattered amongst the smoking hulks of burned vehicles.
Splayed around a massive crater in the centre of the intersection were the twisted metal wrecks of seven or eight jeeps, the paint peeled off by the heat of the bomb blast.
"It was an ocean of fire," said Mr Abdullah Rahman, the commander of the 2nd Peshmerga battalion. "People were screaming, screaming for help."
Mr John Simpson, the world affairs editor of the BBC, received light shrapnel wounds and was able to broadcast from the site. His translator, Kamaran Abdurazaq Muhamed (25), was severely injured and died in an ambulance on the way to hospital.