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Fallujah: Shake And Bake
The Dirty War
There is evidence of massive and indiscriminate' use of a weapon
banned in areas where insurgents and civilians are indistinguishable
By Trevor Royle, Diplomatic Editor
11/20/05 "The
Herald" -- -- Soldiers call them bogey weapons nasty
pieces of military hardware which kill or maim as efficiently as any
other type of armament but in so doing push the victim into a vortex
of agony and suffering. White phosphorus, or Whiskey Pete, comes
into that category. On one level it's a legal military weapon.
Provided that it is used against enemy soldiers as a smokescreen or
battlefield illuminator, it is a useful addition to an arsenal one
reason why it is available to British and US forces in Iraq. On
another level, deployed as an offensive weapon and usually in
secret, it causes severe blistering of the skin and mucous
membranes, and if inhaled can do dreadful damage to internal organs.
When US forces fired WP shells in the battle to break into the Iraqi
city of Fallujah last November they knew exactly what they were
doing. Combat outside daylight hours always causes problems for the
attacking side. Darkness brings the kind of confusion which favours
the defenders. Fired as an artillery shell, WP explodes in the air
creating a bright artificial light and providing a useful
smokescreen for the attacking infantry soldiers. After the battle
for Fallujah the Bush administration admitted that WP had been used
sparingly and had only been fired into the air to illuminate enemy
positions, not at enemy fighters .
Like so much that has happened in this long, drawn-out and
increasingly dirty counter-insurgency war, the use of WP was not
what it seemed. Last week an Italian television documentary,
Fallujah: The Hidden Massacre sounded the first blast on the whistle
when it claimed that WP had been used in a massive and
indiscriminate way not only against the insurgents but also against
civilians. Some Iraqi doctors claimed that the victims had melted
skin or that white phosphorus had burned through body tissue to
leave bones exposed.
Jeff Englehart, an experienced US marine interviewed in the
documentary gave a chilling account of what happens when WP is
unleashed It doesn't necessarily burn clothes, but it will burn the
skin underneath clothes. And this is why protective masks do not
help, because it will burn right through the mask . It will manage
to get inside your face. If you breathe it, it will blister your
throat and your lungs until you suffocate, and then it will burn you
from the inside. It basically reacts to skin, oxygen and water. The
only way to stop the burning is with wet mud. But at that point,
it's just impossible to stop.
Denials came thick and fast from Washington but these were given
short shrift when a semi-official US army publication, Field
Artillery Magazine, published a damning article claiming the exact
opposite. What gave the article substance was that it was based on
an official army account which has been seen by the Sunday Herald: a
Memorandum for Record prepared on December 1, 2004 by the FSE (fire
support element) of the US Task Force's 2nd Battalion, 2nd Infantry,
3rd Brigade Combat Team. In the paper the US artillery commanders,
two officers and a sergeant, admitted that WP had been used in an
offensive capacity against Iraqi positions : We used it for
screening missions at two breeches and, later in the fight, as a
potent psycho logical weapon against the insurgents in trench lines
and spider holes . We fired shake and bake' missions at the
insurgents, using WP to flush them out and HE [high explosive] to
take them out.
In other words WP had been fired to force Iraqis out of their
defensive positions or hiding places to enable them to be gunned
down by conventional weapons. With shake and bake , the terminology
camouflages the reality of what happens when exploding phosphorus
comes into contact with bodies.
In the midst of the fighting, civilians were caught up in the
action. Fallujah was a break-in battle with US forces hitting the
opposition as hard as possible at their weakest points in order to
get their soldiers inside the enemy perimeter quickly and
efficiently.
In those circumstances, the difference between insurgents and
civilians was bound to be blurred . In the aftermath there were
complaints that ordinary Iraqis had been killed by US forces.
Hard-bitten soldiers might say that in actions like Fallujah,
civilian casualties are an unavoidable, though unhappy, consequence
of that kind of combat. But if WP was used in Fallujah, more than
moral lines were crossed. Under the terms of protocol III of the
1980 Convention on Conventional Weapons to which the US is a
signatory, the use of incendiary weapons against civilians is
expressly forbidden.
The proper use of WP seems clear-cut, but in the mayhem created by
counter-insurgency warfare the lines become blurred, not least in
this case because most of the Iraqi fighters did not wear uniforms
and were indistinguishable from civilians. As a recently retired US
officer with experience of Iraq explained, weapons like WP are no
respecters of persons. In the heat of combat when nerves are
jangling there's not much time for circumspection, and split-second
decisions always bring consequences, he told the Sunday Herald. Like
anything else of its kind, WP's a dumb weapon which depends on the
guy firing it. If he aims at an insurgent target and civilians are
killed, is he to blame or is it just down to the circumstances of
the battlefield?
Any attempt to address that conundrum has to take account of the
equation which commanders bring to fighting in built-up areas where
there are civilians . While there are protocols in the Geneva
Conventions to protect civilians in warfare, all too often these are
honoured in the breach as any account of recent internecine fighting
in Africa will reveal. In Iraq the coalition forces have done their
best to avoid civilian casualties. Not only is the unlawful killing
of non-military personnel a crime under military law but it is
counter-productive in the war to win hearts and minds. Even so, most
commanders admit that they operate a rough-and-ready system of
proportionality whereby it is considered inevitable that some
civilians will be caught up in fighting and that many will be
killed.
Show me a soldier who enjoys killing non-combatants and I'll show
you a military illiterate, said the Sunday Herald's military source.
No one in Fallujah set out to kill ordinary Iraqis but the type of
battle and the intensity of the fighting in that town made it almost
inevitable that there would be civilians among the KIAs [killed in
action]. Regrettable, yes; avoidable, no.
The revelation of the use of WP against civilians has led to the
usual calls for an inquiry and for something to be done to avoid a
repetition of the occurrence. As a first step Iraq's human rights
minister, Narmin Othman, has been made responsible for an
investigation which will try to determine if WP was used at Fallujah
and, if so, whether it was used against civilians. It is a laudable
motive but even if there is a full and fair investigation involving
the people of Fallujah as witnesses it is doubtful if there will be
any realistic conclusion. Because the US has a good record in
battlefield management it will be easy to prove if WP was fired. But
uncovering the truth about the identity of the targets will be nigh
impossible.
In that respect, WP will join the list of weapons which sit uneasily
on the dividing line between being legal and illegal or dubiously
moral and downright immoral. Many weapons come into this category.
In the first world war machine-gunners could expect little mercy if
they fell into the hands of the enemy . Soldiers firing
flame-throwers in the second world war also came into that category
. Napalm caused equal revulsion in Vietnam and became an icon of
American frightfulness. In Iraq, WP fills a similar function as do
cluster bombs and Mk 77 incendiary bombs .
As became evident last week, it is undeniable that WP was used
against Iraqis in the battle for Fallujah which involved US forces
in the fiercest urban fighting since the battle for Hue City in
Vietnam in 1968. Innocents were killed, and the use of these weapons
has been denied or covered up . Past experience suggests that it
will be difficult to find out the reasons for using WP or if
civilians were among the victims.
From the shooting down of a clearly identified RAF Tornado aircraft
in the early days of the war, to the treatment of prisoners in the
Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, the US forces in Iraq have not been
adept at holding up their hands to admit responsibility when things
go wrong. Nobody has acknowledged responsibility for the recent
killing of Manadel al-Jamadi, an Iraqi detainee, while he was in CIA
custody in Abu Ghraib and, at the very moment that the use of WP was
being denied, the US was having to confront fresh evidence that
Sunni prisoners were being maltreated in an interior ministry
punishment complex at Jadriyah in Baghdad.
A year ago at Fallujah, the smokescreen laid down by US forces
eventually cleared into thin air. In the same way the stink about WP
will also die down and gradually be forgotten except, perhaps, by
the victims who were left with burns so deep that even their bones
were exposed. Surgery might help to make them whole again but no
amount of politician's bluster will explain why the fire support
element of the 2nd Battalion of the 2nd US Infantry locked and
loaded WP in their artillery pieces and fired them into an Iraqi
city to shake and bake its unwitting inhabitants.
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