BBC decides to join the insurgency

This is an absolute disgrace, and steps over the line from moral equivalency to the straightforward reporting of propaganda as truth.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/4850108.stm

"Approximately 18 innocent men who were inside the mosque performing sunset prayers were killed and became martyrs," Bayan Jabr added in an interview on Dubai-based al-Arabiya television. "They were killed unjustly and wrongfully." Some members of the ruling Shia Islamist alliance repeated allegations - denied by US officials - that Americans and Iraqi troops under their command had tied people up at the Mustafa mosque in north-east Baghdad's Sadr City up and shot them in cold blood.

News footage taken after the attack seemed to belie US assertions that troops had not entered or damaged any sacred building during the raid.
The room where the killing occurred appeared to be a prayer hall. The floors are carpeted and the walls covered with religious posters.
The tape showed a tangle of male bodies and spent 5.56mm bullet casings on the blood-smeared floor - the kind of ammunition used by the US military.

Not that anybody is going to believe them, but,

The US military said the bloodshed happened after Iraqi commandos and soldiers from the Iraqi counter-terrorism force came under fire during a house-to-house search for insurgents.
Members of the US special forces were present but only in an "advisory capacity", officials said.

So the BBC is perfectly happy to have the major impact of this story be "US soldiers murder poor ickle muslim men in their mosque while they're praying".

There is absolutely no context written into this article. Any attempt at sane and balanced reporting of this incident would state the following facts: ever since US forces arrived in Iraq, Moqtada Al Sadr and his cadre of self-styled martyrs have been fanatically opposed to their presence in Iraq. Al Sadr has already attempted one holy war against the coalition forces, which failed dismally. Even Sistani, the senior Shia cleric in Iraq, has trouble dealing with Sadr and his thugs. And of course, the one overriding consideration in Iraq, that all gangs and private armies have to be disarmed or destroyed before peace and development can come to Iraq.

But these are explanatory facts, and facts no longer interest the America-haters at TVC.