Iraqi police shoot dead four US soldiers: ministry

Iraqi policemen shot dead four US soldiers and their local interpreter in the main northern city of Mosul on Tuesday, an interior ministry official said.

“Four US soldiers and their Iraqi interpreter were killed by two Iraqi policemen who opened fire at them in the Dawasa district of (central) Mosul and then fled,” the official told AFP, declining to be named.

The incident took place during a US army visit to the Mosul headquarters of the Iraqi police in charge of protecting the city’s bridges, police said. The bullet-riddled body of the interpreter was taken to the local mortuary.

It was the third such fatal shooting involving US soldiers in just over a year in Mosul, one of the country’s most restive cities.

On November 12, an Iraqi soldier shot dead two US soldiers in the city before being shot dead himself, but US and Iraqi officials differed sharply on what actually happened.

I greatly fear that the Iraqi police and military are both riddled with fanatic Iranian Shia sympathizers - not terribly surprising, given that the backbone of both springs from the Badr Brigades, a paramilitary organization created in Iran whose members are still, in some part, paid with Iranian money.

UPDATE: By the way, does anybody doubt that this would be page one, top of the hour evidence of the bankruptcy of Bush Iraqi policy, if GWB were still in office? Under Obama, though, (as noted in somewhat similar circumstances) the mainstream media no longer has to pretend it gives a damn about either Iraqis, or American military lives.

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