All-Male Terrorists

No doubt most will have heard about the loss of 15 civilians following an American operation in Iraq. There is a detail to this that's been missed in most of the coverage.

The US military stated that the operation resulted in the deaths of "19 insurgents and 15 civilians". However, an equally accurate way to write this would be "19 men, 6 women and 9 children".

It seems that the insurgents have been identified as such purely on the basis that they're male. This prompts two obvious questions. Firstly, does the Americans assume that all Iraqi men are insurgents, and secondly do they assume that women and indeed children could not be? Experiance of both in the west bank tells us that such simplistic assumptions are folly, and it makes one wonder how many actual insurgents were present at all.