BASRA, Iraq — I walked, ran and crawled into central Basra on Thursday, constantly dropping to the ground because of gun battles between Mahdi Army militiamen and the Iraqi Army and the police.

The rest of my stay in the city went like this: On Friday evening, the hotel I had somehow found open was showered with bullets, smashing glass on several floors and knocking pieces out of the stone facade. The next morning, Iraqi Interior Ministry forces in a part of the city they supposedly controlled were ambushed with heavy weapons at a hotel 50 yards from mine. On Sunday morning, after I had hired someone to drive me out of the city, an Iraqi soldier fired at our tires but missed. We did not stop.

Iraqi forces started their assault on the Shiite militias in Basra on Tuesday. Whatever the initial goal of the operation, by the time I arrived in Basra it was a patchwork of neighborhoods that were either deserted or overrun by Mahdi fighters. There were scattered Iraqi Army and police checkpoints, but no place seemed to be truly under government control.

Early last week, when the assault started, I happened to be in Diwaniya, another southern city, as part of my work as a reporter and translator for The New York Times.

Calling on my experience as a captain in the Iraqi Army before the 2003 invasion and essentially a war correspondent since then, I headed to Basra to see if I could make my way into the city and see what was happening there.

...

A while after the shooting stopped, some other residents of the hotel and I went outside. The street was littered with the shells of heavy machine guns where the Mahdi Army had fired toward another hotel, the Meerbad, where Ministry of Interior officials were staying, perhaps 50 yards away. We could see their pickup trucks, now full of bullet holes, in the parking lot of the hotel.

I decided to leave Basra. I took the white flag with me.

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For a couple of days, that great and unfortunately necessary site mentioned above has been off the web.  I discovered a few days ago that something was not quite right. Some strange noises and weird things were happening as I logged on to various part of the site. I am glad they have found the source of the problem. They have restored at least the main list on US troop information death, especially when Bushit-the-bravado is spinning more tall tales about the "surge". So far this month 20 US soldiers have died and if this trend continues, about 60 will have been killed by the end of the month. Hopefully not.

US helicopter kills Iraqi civilians          

A US military helicopter air assault has killed eight Iraqi civilians, including two children, in Baiji, north of Baghdad.
 
Colonel Mudhher al-Qaisi, Baiji's police chief, told Reuters news agency on Thursday that the attack targeted a car of shepherds who were in a farming area in the town late on Wednesday.
   
"This is a criminal act. It will make the relations between Iraqi citizens and the US forces tense. This will negatively affect security improvements," al-Qaisi said.
 
Police Major Ahmed Hussein said two boys aged eight and 11 were among the victims.
   
A doctor who asked not to be named said Baiji hospital received eight bodies after the incident, including a 60-year-old man.
 
Reuters photographs showed relatives of the dead standing beside their corpses covered by white sheets outside a mosque in Baiji, 180km north of Baghdad.
 
Lieutenant-Colonel Maura Gillen, a US military spokeswoman, said the military was following up the incident, in which "suspicious activity" had been noted and warnings to stop the car were ignored.
 
The incident comes at a sensitive time.

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Gus: In fact the chopper had nothing to do with the killings, should we take the NRA's words for it...: Guns don't kill people. People with gun kill people. Choppers don't kill people. US army troopers in a chopper decided to shoot something.

Exonerate yourself and blame the family shot dead, for not following the rules of US troops "engagement" or rules set by the US administration in regard to stopping when asked... The poor buggers may not have understood the vernacular nor the Imperial behaviour of the occupier... The poor buggers live in their own country trying to survive and survive they did not... A letter of apology may be on its way by snail mail, due to be delivered in 2015.