Russian convoy in Iraq attacked by US forces

Society Pakistan & World Affairs
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“The Russian ambassador to Iraq Vladimir Titorenko thinks that the column of Russian cars, filled with diplomats and journalists, was deliberately attacked by the Americans,” RIA Novosti wrote.

US forces deliberately attacked Russian convoy: Russian ambassador](http://www.spacewar.com/2003/030407200326.jxix7eu9.html) Agence France-Presse (Spacewar News)

MOSCOW (AFP) Apr 07, 2003
The Russian ambassador to Iraq on Monday accused US forces of deliberately shooting at his convoy as it was fleeing Iraq for Syria, the RIA Novosti news agency reported.The report, filed from the Iraqi-Syrian border, said Ambassador Vladimir Titorenko suffered a slight injury to his arm in the attack.

“The Russian ambassador to Iraq Vladimir Titorenko thinks that the column of Russian cars, filled with diplomats and journalists, was deliberately attacked by the Americans,” RIA Novosti wrote. ** Russian news reports had earlier said that the convoy was carrying Russian flags as it was leaving Baghdad. The state-run news agency said that four cars in the convoy had been hit in the attack and that US M-16 bullet casings were found in the vehicles.** The report further accused US forces of trying to stop the Russian convoy for inspections several times, “but these attempts were thwarted by the Russian diplomats.”

In a later interview with ITAR-TASS news agency, Titorenko said US forces had shot at his convoy although the Russians had agreed on a time and route for their evacuation from Baghdad with the US authorities. “When we left Baghdad at a time and following a route agreed with the Americans, a column of US tanks, armored troop carriers and mobile artillery blocked our way,” Titorenko said. “Our convoy, headed by my car and carrying Russian flags, stopped, but they unexpectedly opened fire,” he added.

“All our attempts to come out of our cars to explain the situation were met by rounds of machine gun fire,” Titorenko said. A senior US official in Washington conceded that US troops probably fired at the Russian diplomats but suggested that Iraq set up the incident by changing the convoy’s planned route. According to eyewitness accounts, the convoy was caught in crossfire between US and Iraqi soldiers although the reports were not clear as to which side fired first.

US national security adviser Condoleezza Rice assured President Vladimir Putin in Moscow Monday that if US troops had indeed shot at the convoy, then no harm had been intended, a senior US official said. But the official stressed this did not mean Washington accepted that US forces were to blame. Titorenko and other Russian diplomats previously posted in Baghdad arrived in Damascus Monday. A Russian emergencies ministry plane flew out to Syria early Monday to pick them up.

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Blue on blue, Heart ache from heart ache.

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I wonder how we can be so devastatingly effective in dismembering little Iraqi children when we target them for murder but we can't hit one blooming Russkie when we shoot at them.

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[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by myvoice: *
I wonder how we can be so devastatingly effective in dismembering little Iraqi children when we target them for murder but we can't hit one blooming Russkie when we shoot at them.
[/QUOTE]
Why dont you ask the generals that question! The facts are that the Red Cross has reported that hundreds of civilians including many women and children have been killed by US missile attacks and lately by artillery shells within civilian areas.

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And one of the best euphemisms of all is the term “under investigation”: Rather than ever admit that we killed civilians or citizens of a neutral country, we always say that the “incident is under investigation.”

Trigger-happy US says it didn’t do it](http://www.russiajournal.com/news/cnews-article.shtml?nd=36712) The Russia Journal

By Matt Taibbi April 08, 2003

Even before the news broke that a convoy of Russian diplomats had been attacked on the outskirts of Baghdad by what may or may not have been U.S. forces, it should have been clear to any observers that the Americans are following a consistent strategy in Iraq: If it moves, shoot it. It seems the Russians don’t watch the news, because over the weekend the strategy apparently became official policy. Gen. Peter Pace, Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Meet the Press that “if it moves and it takes aggressive action, it’s going to get killed.”

Pace did not elaborate on what exactly the army’s definition of aggressive action was. One can imagine an Iraqi civilian sitting on his toilet, hesitant to flush, not sure if he’s about to cross the line. It has certainly been true that a great many things that moved while not taking aggressive action have already been killed in spectacular fashion in this action: a British Tornado jet, a convoy of Kurdish fighters, a busload of Syrians, two separate groups of marketplace shoppers in Baghdad, numerous blades of swaying desert grass in Turkey and Iran, and so on, and so on.

All of these instances should have been enough to at least slightly temper the media’s enthusiasm for such transparent absurdities as “precision bombing,” but through the weekend the public confidence in our superior technology was still at an all-time high. The extremely perilous incident involving the Russian party was largely ignored in the United States because it underscored a politically dangerous fact about this military engagement; no matter how good our weapons are, they’re still fired by people (except in the case of some of our better automated weapons, like the Patriot missile, which was seemingly designed to shoot down British aircraft) - and our people, on the whole, are not geniuses.

Unfortunately, they don’t need to be. Another aspect of this war’s character that the Russian diplomat story laid bare is the utter inability of the U.S. Central Command to tell the truth about anything - and the willingness of the friendly press to go along. It is almost too bad that very few Americans have had the experience of reading Soviet newspapers, because those of us who have recognize in American war coverage the same kind of editorial instincts that once brought Russians headlines like, “Aviakatastrofa - zhertv nyet.” (“Plane crash. No casualties.”)

Battles that rage for 10 hours, involve whole battalions and claim hundreds of Iraqi dead in house-to-house fighting will claim no coalition casualties save a non-military truck crash that kills six Marine cooks in a freak accident. All reports of civilian casualties are described by the military as “alleged,” while “friendly fire” is always described as the cause of any irrefutably war-related coalition deaths, the Iraqis presumably too incompetent and backward to inflict any damage. And one of the best euphemisms of all is the term “under investigation”: Rather than ever admit that we killed civilians or citizens of a neutral country, we always say that the “incident is under investigation.”

Here’s Don Rumsfeld on a missile that landed in Iran: "I’ve heard the reports. There’s an investigation under way. And the normal procedure is that there is a method of identifying friendly aircraft. “And if, indeed, what you said occurred, it very likely was a result of the fact that either the identification in the aircraft wasn’t working properly or the ability to identify the identification from the Patriot battery wasn’t working properly, in which case this type of a tragedy can occur.”

Here is what CENTCOM (incidentally, the U.S., once purely an acronym paradise, has taken up the Russian craze for hybrid words like SovBez and GenSek) had to say about the Russian diplomat incident: “Based on the reported location, the incident is believed to have taken place in territory controlled by the Iraqi regime. The inquiry into this incident continues and more details will be made available as soon as possible.” Sound familiar? It should. Because America only has one statement it releases in this war: We didn’t do it."