Shocking pictures of the victims of three separate incidents featured on the front-pages of many papers, with the same image of a distraught Iraqi man weeping over a bundle in a wooden coffin being widely published.

The French left-wing daily Liberation, which ran the headline "Civilians under fire," argued in an editorial that the number of civilian casualties would only rise as Iraqi forces conduct a classic guerrilla campaign from among the ordinary population.

"The Iraqi guerrilla movement pushes its much better-armed Anglo-American adversary to political defeat by getting it to treat as an enemy the population that (US President) Bush claims to protect or liberate," it says.

In a leading article entitled "The death of innocents," the Paris-based International Herald Tribune said the blunders of the last days -- including the shooting of seven women and children at a checkpoint and the death of 33 people in a bombing raid -- were a propaganda gift to Iraq.

"This is just what the Iraqi commanders have in mind when they send soldiers disguised as noncombattants to fire on unsuspecting US troops. The killing of the soldiers is an incidental benefit.

"The real goal is to turn the Americans against Iraqi civilians and cause them to behave like a hostile occupying army rather than the friendly liberators Americans had envisioned," it said.

The British daily The Independent, which is a strong critic of the US-led war, used the incident of the checkpoint shooting to warn the American army against "needless belligerence."

Drawing a distinction between British forces -- with their tradition of "precision, guile and forbearance" -- and the more aggressive approach of the American army, the paper warned that "the price of excessive or indiscriminate belligerence is high."

"In Iraq, where the professed aim is to liberate, the price of failing to observe our self-imposed rules of restraint will be even higher. US and British forces must do their utmost to ensure that these first checkpoint deaths are the last," The Independent said.

"It's not by firing on unarmed people that the invading army will get the population to rebel against internal tyrany," wrote the Spanish left-wing daily El Pais.

While the centre-right El Mundo accused the US media of santising the war for American audiences by shielding them from the most horrific images.

"These images of the casualties of the conflict, which the American television and newspapers are hiding from their public, are the best testament against this offensive, which like Vietnam, will remain in history as an act of barbarity," it added.

In Germany the conservative daily Frankfurter Allegmeine Zeitung (FAZ) said the checkpoint killings showed that "all wars resemble each other in the errors they cause, which have dark consequences for the population and also for soldiers."

The Berlin-based centre-left paper Tagesspiegl asked: "Germans had a bad feeling from the start about this war. Were they not right to do so?"

SPACE.WIRE