January 8, 2008
Four Wheels for the Masses: The $2,500 Car

By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS
MUMBAI, India — What does it take to build the world’s cheapest car?

For Tata Motors of India, which will introduce its ultra-cheap car on Thursday, the better question was, what could it take out?

The company has kept its new vehicle under wraps, but interviews with suppliers and others involved in its construction reveal some of its cost-cutting engineering secrets — including a hollowed out steering-wheel shaft, a trunk with space for a briefcase and a rear-mounted engine not much more powerful than a high-end riding mower.

The upside is a car expected to retail for as little as the equivalent of $2,500, or about the price of the optional DVD player on the Lexus LX 470 sport utility vehicle.

The downside is a car that would most likely fail emission and safety standards on any Western road, and, perhaps, in India in a few years, when the country imposes tougher environmental standards.

But Tata is not looking to ply California’s highways. Instead, the company wants to provide four-wheel transportation for the first time to people accustomed to getting around on two, including hundreds of millions of Indians and others in the developing world.

Even so, the “People’s Car” (a nickname, since Tata has kept the real name under wraps, too) may ultimately affect what many people drive around the world, since it is part of a broader trend among carmakers to try to build less expensive cars.

“It’s basically throwing out everything the auto industry had thought about cost structures in the past and taking out a clean sheet of paper and asking, ‘What’s possible?’” said Daryl T. Rolley, head of North American and Asian operations for Ariba, which helps supply parts to Tata, BMW, Toyota and other carmakers. “In the next five to 10 years, the whole auto industry is going to be flipped upside down.”

The French-Japanese alliance Renault-Nissan and the Indian-Japanese joint venture Maruti Suzuki are trying to figure out how to make ultra-cheap cars for India. And struggling Western automakers are looking to see where the cost-obsessed ethos of the developing world can help their bottom line. In the most recent example, Ford was expected to announce Tuesday that it would make India its manufacturing hub for low-cost cars.

Some analysts are predicting that just as the Japanese popularized kanban (just in time) and kaizen (continuous improvement), Indians could export a kind of “Gandhian engineering,” combining irreverence for conventional ways of thinking with a frugality born of scarcity. Or, as Indian auto executive Ashok K. Taneja describes the philosophy, “When I need silver, why am I investing in gold?”

Some of the few people who have seen the car describe a tiny, charming, four-door, five-seater hatchback shaped like a jelly bean, small in the front and broad in the back, the better to reduce wind resistance and permit a cheaper engine. “It’s a nice car — cute,” said A. K. Chaturvedi, senior vice president of business development at Lumax Industries, a supplier in Delhi that developed the car’s headlights and interior lamps.

Driving the cost-cutting were Tata’s engineers, who in an earlier project questioned whether their trucks really needed all four brake pads or could make do with three. As they built Tata’s new car, for about half the price of the next-cheapest Indian alternative, their guiding philosophy was: Do we really need that?

The model appearing on Thursday has no radio, no power steering, no power windows, no air-conditioning and one windshield wiper instead of two, according to suppliers and Tata’s own statements. Bucking prevailing habits, the car lacks a tachometer and uses an analog rather than digital speedometer, according to Mr. Taneja, who until recently was president of the Automotive Component Manufacturers Association of India, representing many of Tata’s suppliers as they signed deals with the company.

Frugal engineering pervades the car’s internal machinery, too, with even greater implications for the vehicle’s safety and longevity.

To save $10, Tata engineers redesigned the suspension to eliminate actuators in the headlights, the levelers that adjust the angle of the beam depending on how the car is loaded, according to Mr. Chaturvedi of Lumax. In lieu of the solid steel beam that typically connects steering wheels to axles, one supplier, Sona Koyo Steering Systems, used a hollow tube, said Kiran Deshmukh, the chief operating officer of the company, which is based in Delhi.

Tata chose wheel bearings that are strong enough to drive the car up to 45 miles an hour, but they will wear quickly above that speed, reducing the car’s life span but not threatening consumer safety, according to Mr. Taneja. The car’s top speed is 75 miles an hour.

Reducing the weight curbed material costs and enabled the company to use a cheaper engine. People familiar with the car describe a $700 rear-mounted engine built by the German company Bosch, measuring 600 to 660 cubic centimeters, with a horsepower in the range of 30 to 35. By comparison, the Honda Fit, one of the smallest cars available in the United States, has a horsepower of 109.

According to industry experts, the car runs on a continuous variable transmission, a lighter alternative to manual or automatic transmissions.

Though it was never popular in the United States because of its often sluggish acceleration, continuous transmission was once widespread in Europe and has resurfaced in the United States in vehicles like the Nissan Murano S.U.V. and the Toyota Prius.

While Tata reverted to old technologies in places — Leonardo da Vinci conceived an elegant precursor to the continuous transmission in the 15th century — it embraced cutting-edge sourcing practices, said Mr. Rolley at Ariba, which has assisted both Tata and its foreign rivals in buying parts.

Traditionally, carmakers cultivated long-term relationships with suppliers, but companies have gradually embraced electronic sourcing, using Internet auctions that force suppliers to compete for business. But even the most efficient carmakers buy no more than 10 percent to 15 percent of parts electronically, Mr. Rolley said. Tata sources 30 percent to 40 percent that way.

Critics of the Tata car have asked how a car that prunes thousands of dollars off regular prices can possibly comply with safety and environmental norms. The answer may be that the car comes at a particular moment in India’s development, when the country is affluent enough to support strong demand for automobiles but still less regulated than developed countries.

Tata officials say the car will comply with all Indian norms. But they are changing. India’s major cities plan to adopt the Euro IV emissions standard in April 2010, requiring a 35-fold reduction in sulfur emissions over the current Euro III standard, according to Anumita Roychowdhury of the Center for Science and Environment in New Delhi.

New safety rules mandating air bags, antilock brakes and full-body crash tests are also coming, Ms. Roychowdhury said.

She said it was unlikely the car would be able to keep its populist price tag once those regulations take effect.

And the car may be less environmentally friendly than it claims. Unlike cars in the United States, Indian vehicles do not have to come in for regular inspections after they are on real roads, which often batter the systems that curb emissions.

Michael Walsh, a pollution consultant and former United States Environmental Protection Agency regulator, said that a car so cheap was likely to lack the complex technology to maintain its initial level of emissions and that without such technology cars could soon be producing four to five times their initial pollution level.

“It strikes me as impossible that such a vehicle will be a very clean vehicle over the life of the vehicle,” Mr. Walsh said.

In a recent interview, Ratan Tata, chairman of the Tata Group, also suggested that the car’s lightness, while favorable for the environment, had frustrated efforts to make it safe. “We will have far lower emissions than today’s low-end cars,” he said. But, he added, “the emissions standards were much easier to meet than the crash test.”

In most American cars, safety features alone cost more than $2,500, said Adrian Lund, president of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety in Arlington, Va. But, he added, “if what we’re talking about in India is people having the option of getting off the streets, from motorcycles and bicycles where they are at risk from bigger vehicles, this may actually be an improvement of the safety environment.”

Even if the Tata car never drives on Western roads, the philosophy behind it will influence global car makers, Mr. Rolley of Ariba said.

Manufacturers are searching for ways to make small cars for the middle class in India and China; to produce small cars for their own markets, hurt by rising gas prices; and to improve the profit of existing larger cars. Tata’s car would be mined for applicable lessons, Mr. Rolley said, predicting that more would be designed with cost in mind.

In one past example, after Renault-Nissan began making cheap cars in Romania, it transferred low-cost engineering techniques to its plants producing more expensive models — for example, making doors flatter so they could be stacked in greater volume in shipping containers, according to Pauline Kee, a Nissan spokeswoman.

Consumers in wealthy nations can perhaps expect more hollow steering shafts, actuator-free headlights and tiny trunks.

“This will be no different,” Mr. Rolley said, “from when U.S. companies spent a whole decade in the ’80s thinking about what Japanese management techniques they had to adopt.”

The Culture Warriors
The Pentagon deploys social scientists to help understand Iraq's 'human terrain'

By Anna Mulrine
Posted November 30, 2007

BAGHDAD—In the back of an armored Stryker vehicle bound for one of Baghdad's more volatile neighborhoods, the U.S. military is transporting what is perhaps the most controversial weapon in its counterinsurgency arsenal today: civilian anthropologists. Clad in camouflage and combat boots, notebooks at the ready, they step out of the Stryker and head toward a block-long line of Iraqis waiting for bags of rice and other staples to be distributed by soldiers and local politicos.

Lisa Verdon, the human terrain team's social scientist, observes a meeting of sheiks.
(Johan Spanner for USN&WR)

Fouad Lghzaoui, the team's cultural analyst, speaks with a local leader during a walk along a once bustling Baghdad street.
(Johan Spanner for USN&WR)
Lisa Verdon, blond hair tucked up in a camouflage head scarf, steps over a puddle of raw sewage and begins chatting with Iraqi women waiting in line with their daughters. The team's designated social scientist, she breaks out her camera and hands it to a colleague as she poses for photographs with the women. She then spends an hour in the kitchen of a new acquaintance from the line, learning how to bake flatbread—and alarming U.S. soldiers who are momentarily unaware of her whereabouts.

Another local approaches Moroccan-American Fouad Lghzaoui, the team's cultural analyst. He tells Lghzaoui in furtive Arabic that he has seen an insurgent planting a roadside bomb, but he doesn't want to be branded an informant. Lghzaoui arranges for him to speak with U.S. soldiers, then instructs the soldiers to publicly toss the man out by the collar after loudly threatening to arrest him. "It will help protect him," he says.

The Army began training social science recruits for Iraq this year, christening the teams with a classic military appellation—human terrain system. The name may not be an attention-grabber, but the mission has been: The teams act as advisers to brigades, mapping the relationships (human terrain in military parlance) of the power players and the local people. "How do they tie into each other? It's not always obvious," says Verdon. The teams also examine how tribal leaders relate to U.S. troops, she adds. "How are they leveraging what they have to maintain their power, to be able to get what they need from coalition forces?"

The military has come late to appreciate the role that social connections play in Iraqi society, where divisions are not just geographic or religious but also familial and tribal. Understanding those kinds of connections, a key aim of anthropology, can be critical to forging alliances, assessing intelligence—and, military officials add, avoiding unintended consequences. Since the teams began working in Iraq in September, their missions have ranged far and wide. In one neighborhood, a U.S. company commander was struggling with persistent violence coming from a low-income housing area filled with squatters. He was considering demolishing a couple of blocks and asked the team for advice: What would be the effects on the surrounding community's social fabric, he wondered, if he did that?

With a Muslim holiday approaching, another unit wanted to present a goodwill gift to a tribe. One American officer suggested buying 200 goats and bringing them to the local sheik. "The bottom line of our assessment was that you have no idea if they want 200 goats. Maybe they'd rather have some work done on the electrical grid," says Capt. Matthew Tompkins, who heads the team of social scientists—which includes Verdon and Lghzaoui—assigned to the 4th Infantry Brigade Combat Team of the 1st Infantry Division at Forward Operating Base Falcon in southern Baghdad. "You want to do the right thing," Tompkins says. But his teammate Jeff, a former military intelligence analyst who asked that his last name not be used, noted, "The question becomes: How, exactly, do you do that?"

Debate in academia. If the military thought there were any easy answers to such questions, its efforts to encourage social scientists to lend their expertise to the Iraq war have been a case study in just how complicated such a prospect can be. The teams have sparked heated debate in universities and among professional anthropologists, dredging up some dark moments in the history of a field anxious to shake off its past image as a handmaiden of colonialism.

The anthropologists' work has also resurrected the painful specter of widely reviled Cold War-era campaigns, drawing comparisons to the Phoenix Program—a still-controversial Vietnam War operation in which the U.S. government is suspected of using the work of social scientists to help find and kill insurgents—and Project Camelot, in which anthropologists, concealing the military origin of their assignment, were sent to research the potential for internal war in Chile. As a result, many anthropologists rail against arrangements—depicted as the militarization of social sciences—that could knowingly or unknowingly draw academics into battlefield activities. "Anthropologists feel almost polluted by contact with certain parts of the government," says Richard Shweder, an anthropologist at the University of Chicago. "There's a breach-of-trust issue there that hasn't been repaired."

U.S. military officials are working hard to reassure wary academics that this is no covert intelligence operation, charges that have been fueled by ads placed by contractors on job-search sites (including some that specialize in intelligence careers), which request that HTS applicants have experience in the "intelligence arena." James Greer, a retired U.S. Army colonel and deputy director of the program, notes that the teams' reports are unclassified—and that the military is sensitive to the concerns of its critics. "One of the first things we have to be careful of is that anthropology is a very ethical profession. It's almost like doctors—first do no harm."

Greer adds that the teams are reducing the need for lethal military operations. Brigades in Afghanistan, for example, have reported a drop in "kinetic"—meaning violent—encounters since the HTS teams arrived. Largely as a result, the Army recently budgeted $40 million for the program, with plans to more than quadruple the teams, from the six now in Iraq and Afghanistan to 26 by next summer.

Academics, however, remain unconvinced, and recruiting for the positions has been slow and difficult. The Army had to delay the deployment of HTS teams bound for Iraq, in part because it had trouble finding willing Ph.D.-level anthropologists. Some troops grumble that doctorate or no, the teams are simply hitting the ground too late in the war, offering basic advice that falls short of a revelation for soldiers on their second and third tours. Others, however, stress that the teams are proof that the military is doing its best to adapt. "You have all kinds of people in the universities complaining that we got into a situation we don't understand in Iraq and that we're buffoons for not making any efforts to understand the culture," says Col. William Darley, who edits the journal Military Review. "On the other hand, when we try to do it, critics say, 'You can't do that,' or 'What you are doing is somehow immoral.' "

Priorities. There can be occasional tensions between the teams and the brigades they serve, as well. When Verdon and Lghzaoui meet their boss, Col. Ricky Gibbs, the brigade commander, for the first time, the encounter is a bit uncomfortable. Gibbs has just returned from his two-week home leave, and though he personally requested one of the HTS teams after hearing about them from a friend, he expresses concerns about how they will operate within the chain of command. After the team ticks off a few planned projects, for example, Gibbs has a question: "Who told you to study those things?"

What he most wants to know, he says, is the following: "How do I make [Iraqis] realize that I'm thinking what they're thinking?" The questions keep coming. "How do I approach them in a way that helps? How do I get into the clique? How can I win the information campaign using the way they think?"

Gibbs ends the exchange with a final query: "Are you all going to help?"

"We will try," answers Lghzaoui. " Inshallah [God willing]."

Verdon winces. Gibbs looks at his team. "There is no trying," he says. "We're going to do an American inshallah on this one." That means, he says, "We're going to do it." Later, Verdon digests the encounter, noting the teams have to be sensitive to the can-do American military culture, too.

It was not to be the only hiccup in cultural understanding. Generally about half of the HTS members on any given five-person team are troops who help translate the observations of the social scientists into action for soldiers. Each team member is authorized to receive weapons training and carry a gun. This policy caused a problem during FOB Falcon team's first weeks with the brigade, says Verdon. The soldiers "were wondering what we as civilians were doing carrying rifles," she adds. "It was not the kind of attention we wanted." Verdon and Lghzaoui now wear camouflage fatigues but carry no weapons. Authorizing civilian anthropologists to carry arms, however, has not advanced their case among academics, who argue that the result of any anthropological mission with weapons involved is intimidation, inadvertent though it may be.

Easy targets. Over dinner at FOB Falcon, Tompkins and Jeff decompress. Their days are stressful—in their first month in Iraq, a humvee they were in was hit by a roadside bomb. Jeff has bits of shrapnel still in his arm, and as a result of the explosion, both occasionally have trouble hearing each other over the din of the dining hall. They know, they say, that anthropologists in war zones are easy targets for satire—even within the brigade. They joke about soldiers coming to them to ask about the cultural implications of, say, killing an entire town—a bit of admittedly dark humor, they are quick to add.

Despite the occasional jokes, the input has been invaluable for the brigade, Gibbs says. He points to one recent incident, when the team came across a series of snake posters in an Iraqi neighborhood that read "Say no to sectarianism" in Arabic, explains Jeff, and had "some funky hand-drawn snakes on them." The team researched snakes—positive symbols in the context of local culture. "When I first saw the snake posters, I thought, 'Oh, my gosh, this means they hate us,' " Gibbs says. "Then I saw that I could capitalize on it."

Tompkins notes that the incident, too, illustrates the challenges of churning out clear-cut "lessons learned"—a favorite military pursuit—for the brigade. After the snake poster episode, for example, the initial impulse from one soldier was to suggest putting snakes on all posters. "You can draw the wrong lessons," says Tompkins, "or the lessons too strongly."

The teams are aware, too, of the controversy surrounding the work they do and what the military calls "information operations," also known by the highly charged but still commonly used term "psychological operations." These are efforts that the military believes are at the crux of any counterinsurgency campaign: winning over the local population. "It's marketing, not mind control," says HTS Program Director Steven Fondacaro. "A commander might say, 'Wow, it's great to know that this tribe has been fighting for water rights in this oasis area for 600 years.' But the question still on his mind is 'So what?' How do you reach people with a message and a solution that's right for them?"

Making a difference. For their part, Tompkins and Jeff would like to see the military do less advertising through big contractors on job websites and more outreach to the academic community, perhaps offering to speak in debates on campus. Doing so might give a chance, Tompkins adds, for the military to challenge scholars, too: "One argument I haven't heard the military make is 'To what extent are you valuing your discipline over real lives that you could be making a difference in?' That might not change any minds, but you could make the case."

Some anthropologists, while remaining critical of the program, are beginning to argue that perhaps the Pentagon has a point, to an extent. "I think we need to break out of the 1960s mold that many of us are in," says Shweder. He notes that such a move is "a long way" from supporting the notion of anthropologists on the Pentagon payroll, but he adds that perhaps it is time for social scientists to more constructively participate in conversations with the military. "My perception," he says, "is that the military is more free-thinking than other parts of the government." Fondacaro says that he was recently approached by the head of the American Anthropological Association, who suggested a sit-down.

Back at FOB Falcon, Tompkins says that the team's greatest challenge on the streets of Iraq mirrors its biggest hurdle on the home front: overcoming suspicion of the American military. "Just saying, 'Trust us, we're the good guys,' isn't going to get us very far."

Why Al-Qaeda Is Losing
By Gary Anderson
Sunday, January 13, 2008; B07

The conventional wisdom is that al-Qaeda is making a comeback from its rout in Afghanistan. Many point to its success in killing Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan and to its support of Islamic insurgents there as evidence. Not so. Al-Qaeda is waning. Its decline has less to do with our success than with the institutional limitations of the al-Qaeda organization. Simply stated, to know al-Qaeda closely is not to love it.

Everyplace where al-Qaeda has gained some measure of control over a civilian population, it has quickly worn out its welcome. This happened in Kabul and in Anbar province in western Iraq. It may well happen in Pakistan as a reaction to the killing of Bhutto.

No one likes to be brutalized and dominated by foreigners. The weakness of al-Qaeda is that everywhere it goes its people are strangers. This is no way to build a worldwide caliphate.

We may not be loved in Iraq and Afghanistan, but compared with the deliberately brutal methods of bin Laden's associates we become a palatable alternative. This is particularly true because, like visiting grandchildren, we will eventually go home.

Bhutto once responded to a friend who was concerned about her safety by saying, "Muslims don't kill women." She was only partly right; real Muslims don't do that, but al-Qaeda does. Its members have killed more Muslim civilians than have misdirected coalition airstrikes in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. The difference is that the Americans and their allies regret and investigate such incidents; al-Qaeda plans and celebrates them.

Why, then, are we supposedly losing the information war in the Muslim world, and why has there not been more of an outcry among Muslims over this slaughter of innocents? A big part of the reason is that we spend too much time wanting to be liked rather than turning Muslim anger on our enemies.

We preach some values that are viewed as alien and threatening to the traditional order of things. Our popular culture is seen as decadent at best and downright threatening at worst in traditional cultures. Our message isn't selling. We can't change what we are, nor would we want to. No matter how much the government may disapprove, the government's official propaganda will be overwhelmed by the deluge, both positive and negative, from the popular media. We need to accept this fact and move on, rather than waste more millions on strategic communications "charm campaigns."

What we can do is to expose our Islamic extremist enemies for what they are. The people of Afghanistan and Anbar found this out the hard way and threw the rascals out. But when al-Qaeda kills scores of innocents, we report it as a statistic without context. We may see weeping relatives and bloodstained bodies from a distance, on video or in photographs, but they are depersonalized, and people quickly become desensitized to anonymous images. Ironically, Stalin was right: One death is a tragedy; millions are a statistic. We need to help Muslims understand how these people really treat other Muslims.

The original Islamic movement spread its doctrine by a combination of military action and compassion. Charity was a key tenet. This is largely why Hamas and Hezbollah gain a degree of popular support in the areas they control. That ingredient is missing in the al-Qaeda/Taliban approach to the world. To them, winning hearts and minds means, "Agree with us or else." That is largely the reason that the U.S. government dropped its early "for us or against us" approach. It has taken us some time, but we seem to be recovering from that approach.

If I were directing the U.S. strategic information campaign, I would spend my dollars on collecting photos of the Muslim innocents al-Qaeda has killed and putting below them quotations from the Koran decrying such practices. These advertisements would appear in every newspaper and TV station in the Muslim world where I could buy print space or air time.

We may not be losing the war on terrorism, but we are not doing all that we can to win it.

Gary Anderson led a study of al-Qaeda from 2003 to 2005 for a Defense Department contractor. He lectures on "The Revolution in Military Affairs" at George Washington University.

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Understanding why our opponent can't win helps us avoid losses

OP-ED: "Why Al-Qaeda Is Losing," by Gary Anderson, Washington Post National Weekly Edition, 21-27 January 2008, p. 31.
SPECIAL REPORT: "The Culture Warriors: The Pentagon deploys social scientists to help understand Iraq's 'human terrain,'" by Anne Mulrine, U.S. News & World Report, 10 December 2007, p. 34.
Nice piece by Anderson (always sharp) that says al Qaeda's foreign-body reality always ends up being rejected by the host because its brutality creates an antibody response (locals get fed up and eject).

This is important to remember as we credit the surge with "winning the war" (Fareed's point recently): our change in tactics (getting out and about, cutting deals) took advantage of that, with the numbers helping somewhat but not decisively. As the Sunnis simultaneously gave up hope of reunifying Iraq by restoring dominating over the Shiia, we got a much quieter Sunni population in the bargain, thus essentially sealing Iraq's soft partition. Question now is how long must we stay and how many bodies required to stave off any resumption of sectarian violence.

The how long question is a depressing one, given the recent events in Lebanon, so the need to upgrade our "human terrain" knowledge is crucial to avoiding future screw-ups. As for making a better future, no amount of anthropology will do, because there you're into economic development, and God help you if you take the advice of anthropologists on that one.

So, having basically dealt with the great cause celebre of al Qaeda (Iraq), we're back to that very Balkans-like babysitting job, with long-term economic integration being the main job, even more important than illusory reconciliation, which will go nowhere in the zero-sum environment that is non-Kurdish Iraq's continuing great depression.

Mass grave discovered near Baghdad
1 hour, 29 minutes ago
About 50 dead bodies were discovered Tuesday in a mass grave northwest of Baghdad, Iraqi officials said.

U.S.-backed Sunni tribesmen found the grave while patrolling the village of Jazeerah, 15 miles west of Samarra near Lake Tharthar, said Col. Mazin Younis Hussein, commander of the Samarra support force, a group of local men working with U.S. forces.

Some of the bodies were severely decomposed, suggesting they had been buried months ago, while other victims appeared to have been killed recently, said Samarra police Lt. Muthana Shakir, who visited the site Tuesday and saw the bodies.

As many as 200 bodies have been unearthed in recent months from mass graves around Lake Tharthar. Al-Qaida in Iraq controlled the area, as well as huge swaths of Iraq's western deserts, until being ousted early this year in an uprising by local tribes.

Also Tuesday, at least three Iraqis were killed and one child was injured after American soldiers stormed a tiny one-room house north of Baghdad and opened fire, U.S. and Iraqi officials said.

Iraqi police, relatives and neighbors said a couple and their 19-year-old son were shot to death in their beds late Monday. But the U.S. military said soldiers came under fire and killed two suspected members of a terrorist cell in self-defense. It said it did not know who shot the woman or the child.

The U.S. military reported only three dead, but Iraqi police said two young girls were wounded and one died Tuesday at a hospital.

It was the second time in as many days that the U.S. military conceded involvement in the death of Iraqi civilians.

On Monday, the military said it had accidentally killed nine Iraqi civilians, including a child, in an airstrike targeting al-Qaida in Iraq south of Baghdad.

In both cases, the military acknowledged involvement in the killings only in response to media inquiries.

Both incidents raised fresh concerns about the military's ability to distinguish friend from foe — and to protect civilians in the line of fire — in its stepped-up campaign to uproot insurgents from Sunni areas around Baghdad.

The latest deaths occurred in the village of Adwar, 10 miles south of Tikrit. The predominantly Sunni area is home to many former members of Saddam Hussein's regime, and has been the frequent site of U.S. raids against Sunni militants.

The U.S. military confirmed the raid in an e-mail to The Associated Press, saying its troops came under small arms fire while entering the building, and that soldiers shot dead two men inside. A woman was killed and one child was injured, but it was unclear who shot them, the military said.

It said the nighttime raid was based on intelligence gleaned from an informant — opening the possibility that the military was misled into targeting the family, perhaps out of local Iraqis' tribal or sectarian motives.

The incident remains under investigation, the military said.

A cousin of the victims, Kareem Talea Hamad, 20, said he watched the killings from his house across the street, and gave a different account of events than the American military's version.

Hamad said U.S. soldiers opened the door to the small brick house and immediately opened fire, killing its unarmed residents: father Ali Hamad Shihab, 55, his wife Naeimah Ali Sulaiman, 40, and their son Diaa Ali, who was a member of a U.S.-backed neighborhood watch group.

Such groups, composed mainly of Sunni fighters partnering with the U.S. to oust al-Qaida from their hometowns, have been targeted by other militants because of their alliance with U.S. and Iraqi forces.

The head of Adwar's Awakening Council, Col. Mutasim Ahmed, confirmed that Diaa Ali was killed. He also offered an explanation for the discrepancy between the U.S. military's account of what happened, and that of Iraqi police and witnesses.

"It seems that some gunmen were positioned near the house and they opened fire on the Americans who returned fire," Ahmed said.

Two other daughters were wounded and transported to hospitals, and one died Tuesday morning, Hamad, the cousin, said. An Iraqi police officer, speaking on customary condition of anonymity, confirmed Hamad's account.

A surviving daughter, Nawal Ali, 16, said she was inside the house at the time of the raid, and that an Iraqi interpreter working for U.S. forces tried to stop the American soldiers from killing her parents.

The unidentified interpreter rushed into the house after he heard gunshots, Ali said. "He shouted at the Americans, saying `What the heck are you are doing?'" she said.

"Then he pushed them away after they killed my family," Ali said. She credited the interpreter for saving the lives of two of her younger siblings, 5-year-old Hamzah and 6-year-old Asmaa.

Witnesses who went to the family's house early Tuesday saw three dead bodies, laid out in their blood-soaked beds. Bullet casings littered the ground.

Relatives and neighbors gathered at the house to mourn the family, and loudspeakers at a nearby mosque announced plans for a funeral.

Later Tuesday, the U.S. military issued a statement saying it "regrets the loss of an innocent civilian and the wounding of a child." It did not name the father and son, but claimed U.S. soldiers killed the men in self-defense.

In Taji, north of Baghdad, a suicide bomber detonated his explosives Tuesday near the convoy of a sheik working with U.S. forces, killing two of his followers, police said. Those killed were members of the Taji Awakening Council, a group of Sunni tribesmen north of Baghdad who have partnered with the Americans to oust militants from their hometowns.

The suicide attacker was standing near a cluster of shops waiting for Sheik Sahthir al-Khlifawi's convoy, when awakening council members spotted him, a police officer said on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to media.

The men approached him after spotting wires dangling from his jacket, and the man then exploded himself, the officer said.

Al-Khlifawi said one of those killed was his nephew.

"We have been expecting such terrorist attacks after we received several threats. I gave orders to intensify security measures in the area," the sheik said.

Separately, the U.S. military said it detained eight suspected militants Tuesday in operations to disrupt al-Qaida in Iraq across northern parts of the country.