UNITED NATIONS, 13 December 2003 - Hundreds of civilian deaths could have been averted in the US-led invasion of Iraq if the military had not used two tactics, according to a Human Rights Watch report released yesterday.
The use of cluster bombs in populated areas caused more civilian casualties than any other factor, the 147-page report said. In addition, 50 strikes by warplanes targeting Iraqi leaders through intercepts of satellite telephone calls killed dozens of civilians but none of the intended targets, the report says. Indiscriminately bombarding civilian areas violates warfare conventions, said Kenneth Roth, executive director of the New York-based Human Rights Watch. “The basic rule is, you have to know who you’re shooting at,’’ he said.
On Thursday, a spokesman for the US Central Command, which is responsible for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, said that the military “applied precise methodology and extreme caution in a meticulous process when choosing valid military targets and munitions, including cluster munitions.’’
“US Central Command understands that various private and international organizations are very concerned with civilian casualties resulting from decisive combat operations in Operation Iraqi Freedom,’’ said the spokesman, Maj. Pete Mitchell. “While any civilian casualties of war are a tragedy, coalition forces have taken extreme care in Operation Iraqi Freedom in limiting needless loss of life and collateral damage.’’
Three analysts from the human rights organization spent five weeks retracing the trail of the US troops through 10 cities and interviewing doctors, victims’ families and US and British military officials.
As US soldiers encountered distant fire on the ground, they shot back with imprecise cluster munitions that carpeted an area with bomblets. “Hundreds of people were killed as a result,’’ Roth said.
Cluster munitions splinter above their targets and rain down dozens, if not hundreds, of smaller explosive devices - bomblets, or submunitions.
The Human Rights Watch analysts calculated that more than 1,000 civilians were killed or wounded by cluster bombs and that unexploded bomblets potentially may cause even more deaths. They did not try to ascertain exactly how many civilians died, calling the number “unknowable’’ because of poor records, some fighters dressed as civilians and an Iraqi Health Ministry clampdown on discussing the issue.
On Wednesday, Iraqi Health Ministry officials ordered a halt to a count of civilian deaths and told workers not to release statistics already compiled, The Associated Press reported. A Los Angeles Times survey of civilian deaths in Baghdad after the war found that at least 1,700 noncombatants died in the five weeks after the war began March 20. An Associated Press study documented 3,240 civilian deaths between March 20 and April 20, based on surveys of about half of Iraq’s hospitals.
The Human Rights Watch researchers also visited the sites of four strikes targeting Saddam Hussein and other senior Iraqi leaders. The Pentagon has acknowledged targeting 50 “high-value’’ targets, often through the global positioning signals emitted by the leaders’ Thuraya satellite telephones. Although the Pentagon says that its intelligence is bolstered by other sources, the signals can pinpoint only a location in about a 100-yard radius, and so residents of neighborhoods where leaders were thought to be sheltered unwittingly became targets as well. In response to questions about children mistakenly killed this week in air raids in Afghanistan, Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Tuesday that the military took pains to avoid killing innocents.
“There are risks, there are risks anytime you go after any target. But I can tell you, the kind of vetting that the process goes through, from the beginnings of intelligence to the final operation, is exquisite,’’ he said.
US Central Command reported that its forces used 10,782 cluster munitions overall, most launched from the ground. Some of the US commanders interviewed said they disliked the tactic, because duds among the bomblets essentially created a minefield that US troops sometimes had to trudge through.
Vernon Loeb of The Washington Post Adds:
Marine Maj. Pete Mitchell, a spokesman for the US Central Command, took exception to the report’s conclusions and said that the war in Iraq was notable for “an unbelievably low amount of collateral damage and needless civilian death. It was a testament to the way we fought and the way we selected weapons. This was a very carefully planned and executed combat operation.’’
These munitions were used to suppress Iraqi air defenses or to clear attack paths for Apache helicopters, and for “counter-battery’’ missions, in which US forces determined the location of Iraqi artillery and mortars and returned fire.
Cluster munitions are designed to kill enemy soldiers and disable their weapons and vehicles by spewing their bomblets or other munitions across a wide area of terrain. But because cluster munitions strike targets across “a broad footprint’’ and cannot discriminate between civilians and soldiers in an attack zone, Human Rights Watch said, their use raises “concerns under international humanitarian law’’ and, at the very least, requires commanders to balance military advantage against possible civilian casualties on a case-by-case basis.
Overall, Human Rights Watch estimated that 10,782 cluster munitions, containing at least 1.8 million submunitions, were used in Iraq. Cluster munitions are highly problematic, the group said, also because bomblets that fail to explode litter the ground after an attack and kill civilians who pick them up or step on them. Two cluster bomb systems used in Iraq by the US Army, the group said, “leave shockingly large quantities of duds’’ on the ground.
In the air war, Human Rights Watch said, attacks aimed at Saddam and other government leaders were flawed because they were based largely on intercepted Global Positioning System coordinates emitted by satellite telephones used by the Iraqis.