Alwaght- Head of the Iraqi parliament’s defense and security committee, Al-Zamili, says that the US strike on Iraqi army forces fuels suspicions in Iraq that the US-led coalition may be helping ISIS terrorist rather than fighting against it, a notion that is widespread in the country .
"We don't believe it was a technical mistake. We constantly see that the US is trying to provide air cover to ISIS. They are preventing us from making an offensive,” Hakim al-Zamili told RT .
"I think everyone is now convinced that the United States is not sincere in its fight against Islamic State. Maybe they have another agenda. The Pentagon, the CIA and other agencies in the US are trying to make a [rift] between Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq,” the head of the Iraqi parliament’s defense and security committee told RT, adding “They are trying to tear [apart] Iraq with the help of their allies like Turkey and the Persian Gulf states ".
Touching on the incident, which happened some 65 kilometers west of Baghdad and killed nine Iraqi forces, an Iraqi officer, who was injured by the US airstrike, told RT that “The distance between our forces and the enemy was very close, meters .”
“We were moving forward and Daesh were retreating, when suddenly the bombing took place on the forces that were behind us,” he said on condition of anonymity, using the Arabic abbreviation for ISIS terrorist group .
He added that the fact that senior officers got injured indicates that the airstrike didn't target the frontline .
However, American officials refused to claim responsibility for the incident, claiming that it could have resulted from "a mistake that involved both sides ".
"[Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi] and I agreed that this was an event that we both regretted and that there would be an investigation of it, but that these kinds of things happen when you're fighting side by side," US Defense Secretary Ashton Carter said on Saturday .
The attack on Iraqi troops is the second embarrassing incident for the US Air Force in recent months. In early October, American warplanes bombed a hospital run by the international aid organization Doctors Without Borders in Afghanistan city of Kunduz, killing at least 42 people. Amid widespread condemnation, Washington said the strike was a mistake and issued a presidential apology, a rare development for incident involving civilian casualties caused by US bombings .
