Fallujah Mosque Killings War Crime

Human Rights Watch said Tuesday, November 16, the killing of wounded Iraqi prisoners amount to a war crime.

“If it is what it appears to be, then obviously it would be a grave breach of the Geneva Conventions. It would probably be a war crime,” Joe Stork, Washington director of the Middle East division of Human Rights Watch, told Reuters.

The US-based rights watchdog echoed calls for an investigation of suspected abuses in Fallujah and other Iraqi cities, including the disproportionate use of force and targeting of civilians.

The shooting in the Fallujah mosque became public Tuesday with the airing of the footage taken Saturday by US NBC pool correspondent Kevin Sites.

In his report, Sites who filmed the grisly scene, said the four men who were killed didn’t appear to be armed or threatening in any way, with no weapons visible in the mosque.

Sites said he saw the marine raise his rifle and fire point blank at the head of one wounded prisoner, who was slumped against a wall in a mosque.

US networks and television channels in other countries have widely shown Sites’ footage, taken Saturday, but halted it in the second before the shot was fired.

Prosecution

The UN’s High Commissioner for Human Rights, Louise Arbour, has urged US occupation troops to probe and prosecute deliberate killings of wounded people and civilians in the embattled Iraqi city of Fallujah.

“The High Commissioner considers that all violations of international humanitarian law and human rights law must be investigated,” Arbour said in a statement carried by Agence France-Presse (AFP).

“Those responsible for breaches — including deliberate targeting of civilians, indiscriminate and disproportionate attacks, the killing of injured persons and the use of human shields — must be brought to justice, be they members of the Multinational Force or insurgents,” she added.

The Swiss-based International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) Tuesday joined a growing chorus of concern over the shocking crime.

Article three of the Geneva Conventions “clearly bans any attack against a person who is not taking part, or is no longer taking part, in hostilities, that includes those wounded, taken prisoner or a civilian,” ICRC spokeswoman Antonella Notari spelt out.

Human rights watchdog Amnesty International said Monday, November 15, it was deeply concerned the rules of war designed to protect civilians and combatants have been violated in Fallujah.

“Amnesty International fears that civilians have been killed, in contravention of international humanitarian law, as a result of failure by parties to the fighting to take necessary precautions to protect non-combatants,” the London-based group said in a report on its website.

“We are not getting the full picture of what is going on in Fallujah,” Amnesty spokeswoman Nicole Choueiry told AFP Monday.

“Some clarification needs to be made, not only to Amnesty but to the whole world because no one has a clear picture of what is going on.”

International law experts in the Middle East have also expressed fury at the incident, widely condemned as a flagrant violation on Geneva Convention on the treatment of war prisoners.

“But Washington had already taken precautions against trying its soldiers before the International Court of Justice by signing bilateral relations with the Iraqi Governing Council it had installed to avoid paying for war crimes,” head of International Law Dept. at Cairo University , professor Salah Amer, told Al-Jazeera TV.

Deplored

Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen, a US ally in the Iraq war, Tuesday deplored the crime at the Fallujah mosque.

Speaking on Danish television TV2, Rasmussen said the incident could only damage the US-led coalition in Iraq, of which Denmark is a member.

“Each time there are claims of or proof of violations, it’s deeply damaging. The international coalition is there to establish democracy and respect for human rights,” Rasmussen said.

Rasmussen, however, told Danish news agency Ritzau that he had “full confidence in the American authorities to carry out an inquiry … and pursue by legal means those responsible.”

The Iraqi Red Crescent appealed Sunday, November 14, for the United Nations to help its convoys reach local citizens after the US military had denied them access to the war-battered city.

An eyewitness, who escaped the hell in Fallujah, told IslamOnline.net Saturday, November 13, that bodies of children and injured in the western Iraqi city were “deliberately” crushed by US tanks.

The shocking scene in the Fallujah mosque comes, in effect, as a grim reminder of the Abu Ghraib scandal, which erupted last spring showing photos of smiling US soldiers sexually abusing and torturing Iraqi prisoners.

Abu Gharib prison has put the US administration in an unenviable situation and generated a worldwide wave of revulsion that raised questions about the treatment of prisoners in Iraq and the notorious US Guantanamo prison in Cuba.