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Hundreds of civilians gunned down at checkpoints
It was lunchtime on September 6 2008 when a pickup truck traveling down a highway in Ninewah province, northwest Iraq, met a US convoy driving in the opposite direction. The driver of the truck was elderly and had cataracts.
When the truck didn't slow down, the soldiers in the convoy tried to get the driver's attention. They shouted, waved and showed their weapons. But the driver apparently couldn't see them and the truck still didn't slow down. So the soldiers fired warning shots.
Realizing he was under fire, the driver tried to stop the truck. But the brakes were poor and he lost control of the vehicle. When the vehicle didn't stop, the US soldiers fired at the driver. He was killed.
The allegations about the incident, reported in the secret war logs, are just one of hundreds of similar tragic cases where it appears Iraqi civilians approaching checkpoints or convoys were killed by US soldiers.
The US war logs show that there were 13,963 incidents linked to convoys or at checkpoints across Iraq from 2004-2009. Most of them ended harmlessly, but when things went wrong it was civilians, more often than not, that got killed.
Through an extensive manual count, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism can reveal that 681, more than 80 percent of those killed in similar incidents, were civilians. Fifty families were shot at and at least 30 children reported killed. In contrast, only 120 insurgents died in checkpoint incidents in the same period.