THE extraordinary photographs show not only the tragedy visited on so many civilians in Iraq. They also make clear the horrific situations in which the US-led forces frequently find themselves.

In this incident two parents were killed and six children left bloody and traumatised when American soldiers opened fire on their car.

It is rare that such shootings are caught on camera. However on Tuesday, the photographer Chris Hondros was embedded with the soldiers on routine patrol in Tel Afar, in northern Iraq. The town is the scene of frequent clashes between US forces and guerrillas.

The deaths took place just after dusk, when the curfew was coming into force. The ethnic Turkoman family was driving through town, the parents in the front, the children in the back, the oldest a teenage girl, the youngest aged 5 or 6.

At the noise of their car in the quiet street a soldier shouted: “Stop that car!” A burst of gunfire broke the night, a volley of warning shots. The car did not stop. A second after the warning shots there was another volley. The car came to a halt at the kerb, its windscreen a web of bullet holes. By now the parents were dead.

As the soldiers approached, the sound of crying came through the sudden stillness, then terrified children started to tumble out, one of them, a small boy, leaking blood from a gash on his lower back.

“Civilians!” shouted a soldier and his comrades, realising their mistake, carried the traumatised children to the pavement and started binding their wounds. The teenage girl, holding her bloodsoaked little sisters, yelled at the masked army translator: “Why did they shoot us? We have no weapons. We were just going home.”

The children were loaded into Bradley fighting vehicles and taken to hospital. Their parents’ bodies were left behind in the blood-soaked family car.

In Mosul the Army issued a dry statement to the effect that “two Iraqi civilians were killed when the vehicle they were driving tried to speed through a Multi-National Force patrol Tuesday in northern Iraq . . . Military officials extend their condolences for this unfortunate incident.”

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