American troops have reportedly shot dead three children in northern Iraq, as the US-led invasion continues to cost more civilian lives in the volatile country.
The children -- all under twelve -- were killed while they were shepherding in the northern Iraqi town of al-Tarmia on Saturday, the Iraq News Agency (Al-dar al-Araqiya) reported without giving further detail.
The US military is yet to comment on the incident.
Previously the US forces had claimed that the Iraqi children are being paid by insurgents to attack their convoys or assist the attackers in some capacity, placing them 'in harm's way'.
Meanwhile, according to eyewitnesses, US forces have reportedly arrested dozens of Iraqis in the town of Abu Ghraib, 32 km (20 mi) west of the capital Baghdad on the same day, the report added.
The arrests follow a three-day-long operation by US troops in the same district, which has forced many Iraqi youths out of the town for fear of being taken into the notorious Abu Ghraib prison camps.
The attacks come more than a month after US troops' withdrawal from Iraqi cities and towns under a security pact between Baghdad and Washington that requires Washington to pull out its troops from the Iraqi soil by the end of 2011.
Shortly before the US military's urban pullout, some six years after its invasion of Iraq in 2003, violence sharply rose with 437 Iraqis killed in June marking the bloodiest month in an almost a year-long period.
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