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Dirty war cuts both ways { March 2003 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://english.aljazeera.net/topics/article.asp?cu_no=1&item_no=1829&version=1&template_id=277&parent_id=258http://english.aljazeera.net/topics/article.asp?cu_no=1&item_no=1829&version=1&template_id=277&parent_id=258
Sutarday 05, April, 2003 / Last Updated: 3:18PM Doha time, 8:18PM GMT
'Dirty war' allegations cut both ways
Lawrence Smallman
“Some of the biggest losses we have taken are due to Iraqis committing serious violations of the law of armed conflict and the Geneva Conventions, by dressing as civilians and luring us into surrender situations and opening fire on our troops,” General Richard Myers, Chairman of US Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters days into the invasion of Iraq.
Since then similar claims have been repeated by US-led forces, particularly in the aftermath of two successful Iraqi human bomb attacks against military checkpoints.
The latest came from Pentagon spokesman, General Stanley McChrystal on 5 April in a briefing to reporters.
But he seemed to be taken by surprise when an American journalist asked him to comment on the the fact that sections of the US-led force routinely operate out of uniform.
His response was one of pregnant silence, as if struck by the reminder that US-led special forces are working in Iraq without uniform.
Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, says, “When combatants disguise themselves as civilians or surrendering soldiers, that’s a serious violation of the laws of war.”
International law prohibits attacking, killing, injuring, capturing or deceiving the enemy by resorting to what is called perfidy - an attack launched by combatants who have led opposing forces to believe that the attackers are really non-combatants.
But the civilian dress issue is less clear-cut than US-led forces are making out. They say the stiff resistance encountered by US and UK forces at Nasiriya was put up by a mix of Iraqi regular army, Ba’ath party officials and militiamen from the Fedayeen Saddam.
These forces' position in international law seems to belie US claims. Since Ba’ath party officials and Fedayeen are not part of the regular military it could equally be argued they have every right to offer armed resistance out of uniforms just as the French Resistance did during the Nazi occupation.
Attacks launched by openly armed belligerents in civilian clothes do not constitute perfidy. The first Additional Protocol in 1977 to the Geneva Convention allows for guerrilla warfare, which has been seen as a valid and appropriate means of fighting for national liberation.
For outgunned Ba’ath party members and Fedayeen, guerrilla tactics, are "far and away their best strategy," according to according to Kenneth Anderson, professor of law at the American University in Washington.
Moreover, disguise and deception are tactics that have been employed by US-led forces throughout this and other confrontations.
US and UK special forces are famous for their ability to infiltrate behind enemy lines, to pass unnoticed in enemy cities to designate targets with laser devices, to ‘take out’ key people and rescue prisoners of war. A whole genre of Hollywood movies and literature has even sprung up in recent years portraying these types of secret operations. No one imagines that secretive special forces units, such as Delta Force and the SAS, walk around behind enemy lines in their uniforms.
United States Special Operations operated for weeks before the war, hunting for Scud missiles and launch vehicles and storage sites for illegal weapons. Army Brigadier General Vince Brooks, Deputy Director Operations for US Central Command said, “we are having very good success, we believe, in the west to limit the options of the regime on threatening its neighbours.”
This war in the west of Iraq has been a silent war, not reported by embedded journalists or by the media, yet it is believed that the land between Jordan and Mudaysis airfield, 273 kilometres to the east, has been completely removed from Saddam Hussein’s control by special forces troops. In the north US special forces are guiding the anti-Saddam Kurdish peshmerga to battlefield successes by operating deep behind enemy lines.
Of more concern is the claim that civilians feign surrender, lure US troops into weak positions and then ambush. Victoria Clarke, the Pentagon spokeswomen in Centcom, describes this as the ‘deadly deception.’ So far there has not been any independent confirmation of these reports but, like the heightened threat of human bomb attacks, they have raised the suspicion that they may simply be deployed by US-led forces as a pretext for an aggressive policy against an unwelcoming Iraqi population.
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