Two Iraqis killed after US forces are attacked
BAGHDAD, April 28 (Reuters) - U.S. soldiers shot and killed two people after they were attacked on Wednesday, but accounts from U.S. and Iraqi officials differed about whether those killed were insurgents or Iraqis caught in the crossfire.
The incident occured three days after a U.S. raid in southern Iraq kicked off a controversy among Iraqis and prompted Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki to demand that U.S. soldiers face trial. Two people were killed in that raid.
Major Scott Rawlinson, a U.S. military spokesman in Kirkuk, said a U.S. unit was on a non-combat mission with Iraqi police in Riyadh, southwest of Kirkuk, on Wednesday when it came under gunfire and grenade attack.
The soldiers returned fire, killing two people identified as insurgents and wounding one person, Rawlinson said.
An Iraqi police official in Kirkuk, speaking on condition of anonymity, also said the two people killed were insurgents.
But Lieutenant Mijbel Eidan, an Iraqi police official in Riyadh, said the people who were killed were civilians who happened to be in the area when the fighting broke out.
Colonel Arsalan Jameel, a spokesman for the 4th Iraqi Army division headquartered in the city of Tikrit, also said those killed were civilians. He said five people were wounded, including one woman.
Rawlinson said one insurgent was wounded and that a woman was treated and released for shrapnel wounds. One U.S. soldier was wounded.
Violence has dropped sharply in Iraq since the height of sectarian bloodshed in 2006-07, but insurgents stage regular attacks, especially in ethnically mixed areas like Kirkuk.
Minority Kurds have been fighting to make Kirkuk, which sits on vast oil reserves, part of their largely autonomous northern region, but Arabs and Turkmen object. The United Nations is trying to broker a compromise solution on control of the region. (Reporting by Mustafa Mahmoud in Kirkuk and Sabah al-Bazee in Tikrit; Writing by Missy Ryan; Editing by Angus MacSwan)
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