Following WikiLeaks’ release of almost 400,000 military documents relating to the war in Iraq on Friday, the Telegraph today reports that it appears that ‘Crazy Horse 18’, the signal which featured in a video released by WikiLeaks earlier this year showing the killing of more than 12 people, including two Reuters staff, has been implicated in a number of other fatal attacks based on the secret records.
Crazy Horse 18 was the call-sign which, after taking legal advice, refused to accept the surrender of two insurgents it cornered while they were firing mortars from a flatbed truck. It killed both men as they sought shelter in a nearby shack during the attack in February 2007.
In June that year, Crazy Horse 18 fired a string of missiles at two more flatbed trucks it thought were carrying missiles, despite recording that it had seen four women in a nearby house waving a white sheet. Six “enemy” died.
In another incident the same month, Crazy Horse 18 fired at a suspect van from which material is being unloaded into a car, and stayed on location “due to possible colatural [sic] damage” – a euphemism for civilian casualties, though the report does not record any.