ARBIL, Iraqi Kur­dis­tan — We arrived today in Arbil, the seat of the Kur­dis­tan Regional Gov­ern­ment, to find a city on edge and in mourn­ing. An Amer­i­can fighter jet had just hit a con­voy of pesh­mer­gas and U.S. Spe­cial Forces in a friendly fire inci­dent that left at at least seven Kur­dish fight­ers and pos­si­bly three Amer­i­can troops dead. Also killed were sev­eral civil­ians, includ­ing the trans­la­tor for BBC’s John Simp­son, Kam­eran Abdul­raz­zaq.
The details of the attack remain unclear, but the attack by an F-15E Strike Eagle seems to have occurred after the lightly armed Kurds and Amer­i­can troops cap­tured one or two Iraqi tanks intact, said Fawzi Hariri, assis­tant to the head of the Inter­na­tional Affairs bureau for the KDP. The pilot of the Amer­i­can plane mis­took the allied forces on the ground and attacked.
Abdul­raz­zaq, an engi­neer by train­ing, was a Simpson’s trans­la­tor. When he couldn’t find a job, one of Hariri’s aides told me, he took the job with the BBC to earn money.
Simp­son him­self was slightly injured in the attack, and one of the BBC’s vehi­cles was almost destroyed. The inci­dent occurred ear­lier today on the road between Peear­dawid and Dybaga, beyond Kalek toward the Iraqi front, Hariri said.
As J. and I pulled up to the hotel, we saw the husk of the BBC Range Rover. All its win­dows were blown out and it’s front and back ends showed clear impact dam­age. The front was torn to hell and burned a bit. It’s a mir­a­cle they were able to get it back to the hotel.
The city itself seems edgy and ner­vous, as can well be expected. Many res­i­dents are glued to Al Jazeera, seek­ing news of friends or rel­a­tives who may have been injured. [J. told me later that he ran into a man on the street who asked if he was Amer­i­can and asked about the inci­dent. J. tried to explain that it was an acci­dent, he said, but the man just shook his head and said, “Very bad, very bad.” It remains to be seen how this attack will affect the Kurds’ feel­ings towards the United States, espe­cially con­sid­er­ing the brother of Mas­soud Barzani, head of the KDP was among the injured.]
Wel­come to the war.
[From Chris, 10:39 p.m.: I added some stuff from J. and edited a lit­tle bit — fix­ing line end­ings and mov­ing Hariri’s attri­bu­tion up so it made sense. Such are the haz­ards of mov­ing para­graphs around using copy and paste sometimes.]