According to the account of the earlier incident in the leaked logs, the insurgents had jumped out of their truck after it came under fire from the Apache. "They came out wanting to surrender," Crazyhorse 18 signalled. Clearance to kill came back from an unnamed lawyer at the nearby Taji airbase. "Lawyer states they can not surrender to aircraft and are still valid targets," the log entry says.

After receiving the lawyer's advice, the pilots reported that the men had by now got back into their truck and were attempting to drive on. The gunship made two attempts to kill the fleeing men, launching a Hellfire missile at the truck. At first the fresh attack failed. "Individuals have run into another shack," the crew signalled. As the Apache hovered high in the sky, a few miles north of Baghdad, the pilots viewed a zoomed-in image of the fleeing pair on their video screen. The crew then received a further specific top-level kill instruction from brigade HQ and made another strafing run, firing bursts from long distance at 300 rounds a minute from the Apache's 30mm cannon. This time, the gunner succeeded in killing both men. At 1.03pm on 22 February, just 24 minutes after receiving legal clearance, the crew filed a log entry: "Crazyhorse 18 reports engaged and destroyed shack with 2X AIF [anti-Iraq forces].

Battle damage assessment is shack/dump truck destroyed." Crazyhorse 18 was part of the US army's 1st Battalion, 227th Aviation Regiment, normally based at Fort Hood, Texas. Five months after this incident, on 12 July 2007, the crew of an Apache with the same call sign mistakenly killed 22-year-old Reuters photographer Namir Noor-Eldeen and his driver, Saeed Chmagh, after opening fire on a group of eight men they believed to be insurgents armed with rocket-propelled grenades and AK47 rifles in a Baghdad suburb.

Two children were badly injured and their father killed when the Apache crew fired armour-piercing shells at a van which arrived on the scene. The account of the February incident recorded in the classified log suggests the Crazyhorse 18 crew were not trigger-happy, but sought immediate advice from their superiors at all stages of the attack.

Lees het Iraqi war log Guardian maar eens. Klik pic of gewoon hier.