Tony Benn would probably be a good person to chair such a group as, i think he was the last Western MP to meet, shake hands, laugh and joke with a highly suspected war criminal responsible for the mass slaughter of innocents... his old buddy old pal... Saddam Hussein. As long as theres no hypocrisy then..

Could you include your reference regarding British troops firing on civilians, particularly the context in which the shooting took place. In other words, for example, were Iraqi troops firing on civilians to prevent them from fleeing and using civilians as human shields?

Tony Benn and George Galloway visited Iraq and met Saddam Hussein to try to persuade him to admit UN Weapons Inspectors; and they succeeded! It doesn't mean they like him or support his regime.

You might recall, before the last Gulf War (1991) they did the same to try to get western hostages released. They succeeded then as well!

do you read the sun?

ooo ooo no let me guess - the big boys version - daily mail?

;-)

No I don't read the Sun since you asked, but I have nothing against it as a source of information. I also read / digest a lot of other forms of media.. I'm thinking your insinuating that people who read the Sun might be less educated, is that your point. Wait a minute why don't I jump to concusions too your mum and dad read the Guardian... If it makes you happy to categorise people for discrimination carry on.. partly cos of people doing that we are at fucking war

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- World















March 30,
2003 US
Marines turn fire on civilians at the bridge of
deathMark
Franchetti,
Nasiriya







THE light was
a strange yellowy grey and the wind was coming up,
the beginnings of a sandstorm. The silence felt
almost eerie after a night of shooting so intense
it hurt the eardrums and shattered the nerves. My
footsteps felt heavy on the hot, dusty asphalt as
I walked slowly towards the bridge at Nasiriya. A
horrific scene lay ahead.

Some 15 vehicles, including a minivan and a
couple of trucks, blocked the road. They were
riddled with bullet holes. Some had caught fire
and turned into piles of black twisted metal.
Others were still burning.
Amid the wreckage I counted 12 dead civilians,
lying in the road or in nearby ditches. All had
been trying to leave this southern town overnight,
probably for fear of being killed by US helicopter
attacks and heavy artillery.
Their mistake had been to flee over a bridge
that is crucial to the coalition’s supply lines
and to run into a group of shell-shocked young
American marines with orders to shoot anything
that moved.
One man’s body was still in flames. It gave out
a hissing sound. Tucked away in his breast pocket,
thick wads of banknotes were turning to ashes. His
savings, perhaps.
Down the road, a little girl, no older than
five and dressed in a pretty orange and gold
dress, lay dead in a ditch next to the body of a
man who may have been her father. Half his head
was missing.
Nearby, in a battered old Volga, peppered with
ammunition holes, an Iraqi woman — perhaps the
girl’s mother — was dead, slumped in the back
seat. A US Abrams tank nicknamed Ghetto Fabulous
drove past the bodies.
This was not the only family who had taken what
they thought was a last chance for safety. A
father, baby girl and boy lay in a shallow grave.
On the bridge itself a dead Iraqi civilian lay
next to the carcass of a donkey.
As I walked away, Lieutenant Matt Martin, whose
third child, Isabella, was born while he was on
board ship en route to the Gulf, appeared beside
me.
“Did you see all that?” he asked, his eyes
filled with tears. “Did you see that little baby
girl? I carried her body and buried it as best I
could but I had no time. It really gets to me to
see children being killed like this, but we had no
choice.”
Martin’s distress was in contrast to the bitter
satisfaction of some of his fellow marines as they
surveyed the scene. “The Iraqis are sick people
and we are the chemotherapy,” said Corporal Ryan
Dupre. “I am starting to hate this country. Wait
till I get hold of a friggin’ Iraqi. No, I won’t
get hold of one. I’ll just kill him.”
Only a few days earlier these had still been
the bright-eyed small-town boys with whom I
crossed the border at the start of the operation.
They had rolled towards Nasiriya, a strategic city
beside the Euphrates, on a mission to secure a
safe supply route for troops on the way to
Baghdad.
They had expected a welcome, or at least a
swift surrender. Instead they had found themselves
lured into a bloody battle, culminating in the
worst coalition losses of the war — 16 dead, 12
wounded and two missing marines as well as five
dead and 12 missing servicemen from an army convoy
— and the humiliation of having prisoners paraded
on Iraqi television.
There are three key bridges at Nasiriya. The
feat of Martin, Dupre and their fellow marines in
securing them under heavy fire was compared by
armchair strategists last week to the seizure of
the Remagen bridge over the Rhine, which
significantly advanced victory over Germany in the
second world war.
But it was also the turning point when the
jovial band of brothers from America lost all
their assumptions about the war and became jittery
aggressors who talked of wanting to “nuke” the
place.
None of this was foreseen at Camp Shoup, one of
the marines’ tent encampments in northern Kuwait,
where officers from the 1st and 2nd battalions of
Task Force Tarawa, the 7,000-strong US Marines
brigade, spent long evenings poring over maps and
satellite imagery before the invasion.
The plan seemed straightforward. The marines
would speed unhindered over the
130 miles of desert up from the Kuwaiti border
and approach Nasiriya from the southeast to secure
a bridge over the Euphrates. They would then drive
north through the outskirts of Nasiriya to a
second bridge, over the Inahr al-Furbati canal.
Finally, they would turn west and secure the third
bridge, also over the canal. The marines would not
enter the city proper, let alone attempt to take
it.
The coalition could then start moving thousands
of troops and logistical support units up highway
7, leading to Baghdad, 225 miles to the north.
There was only one concern: “ambush alley”, the
road connecting the first two bridges. But
intelligence suggested there would be little or no
fighting as this eastern side of the city was
mostly “pro-American”.
I was with Alpha company. We reached the
outskirts of Nasiriya at about breakfast time last
Sunday. Some marines were disappointed to be
carrying out a mission that seemed a sideshow to
the main effort. But in an ominous sign of things
to come, our battalion stopped in its tracks,
three miles outside the city.

Bad news filtered back. Earlier that morning a
US Army convoy had been greeted by a group of
Iraqis dressed in civilian clothes, apparently
wanting to surrender. When the American soldiers
stopped, the Iraqis pulled out AK-47s and sprayed
the US trucks with gunfire.
Five wounded soldiers were rescued by our
convoy, including one who had been shot four
times. The attackers were believed to be members
of the Fedayeen Saddam, a group of 15,000 fighters
under the command of Saddam’s psychopathic son
Uday.
Blown-up tyres, a pool of blood, spent
ammunition and shards of glass from the
bulletridden windscreen marked the spot where the
ambush had taken place. Swiftly, our AAVs (23-ton
amphibious assault vehicles) took up defensive
positions. About 100 marines jumped out of their
vehicles and took cover in ditches, pointing their
sights at a mud-caked house. Was it harbouring
gunmen? Small groups of marines approached,
cautiously, to search for the enemy. A dozen
terrified civilians, mainly women and children,
emerged with their hands raised.
“It’s just a bunch of Hajis,” said one gunner
from his turret, using their nickname for Arabs.
“Friggin’ women and children, that’s all.”
Cobras and Huey attack helicopters began firing
missiles at targets on the edge of the city.
Plumes of smoke rose as heavy artillery shook the
ground under our feet.
Heavy machinegun fire echoed across the huge
rubbish dump that marks the entrance to Nasiriya.
Suddenly there was return fire from three large
oil tanks at a refinery. The Cobras were called
back, and within seconds they roared above our
heads, firing off missiles in clouds of purple
tracer fire.


There were several loud explosions. Flames
burst high into the sky from one of the oil tanks.
The marines believed that what opposition there
was had now been crushed. “We are going in, we are
going in,” shouted one of the officers.
More than 20 AAVs, several tanks and about 10
Hummers equipped with roof-mounted, anti-tank
missile launchers prepared to move in. Crammed
inside them were some 400 marines. Tension rose as
they loaded their guns and stuck their heads over
the side of the AAVs through the open roof, their
M-16 pointed in all directions.
As we set off towards the eastern city gate
there was no sense of the mayhem awaiting us down
the road. A few locals dressed in rags watched the
awesome spectacle of America’s war machine on the
move. Nobody waved.
Slowly we approached the first bridge. Fires
were raging on either side of the road; Cobras had
destroyed an Iraqi military truck and a T55 tank
positioned inside a dugout. Powerful explosions
came from inside the bowels of the tank as its
ammunition and heavy shells were set off by the
fire. With each explosion a thick and perfect ring
of black smoke ring puffed out of the turret.
An Iraqi defence post lay abandoned. Cobras
flew over an oasis of palm trees and deserted
brick and mud-caked houses. We charged onto the
bridge, and as we crossed the Euphrates, a large
mural of Saddam came into view. Some marines
reached for their disposable cameras.
Suddenly, as we approached ambush alley on the
far side of the bridge, the crackle of AK-47s
broke out. Our AAVs began to zigzag to avoid being
hit by a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG).
The road widened out to a square, with a mosque
and the portrait of Saddam on the left-hand side.
The vehicles wheeled round, took up a defensive
position, back to back, and began taking fire.
Pinned down, the marines fired back with 40mm
automatic grenade launchers, a weapon so powerful
it can go through thick brick walls and kill
anyone within a 5-yard range of where the shell
lands.
I was in AAV number A304, affectionately
nicknamed the Desert Caddy. It shook as Keith
Bernize, the gunner, fired off round after
deafening round at sandbag positions shielding
suspected Fedayeen fighters. His steel ammunition
box clanged with the sound of smoking empty shells
and cartridges.
Bernize, who always carries a scan picture of
his unborn baby daughter with him, shot at the
targets from behind a turret, peering through
narrow slits of reinforced glass. He shouted at
his men to feed him more ammunition. Four marines,
standing at the AAV’s four corners, precariously
perched on ammunition boxes, fired off their
M-16s.
Their faces covered in sweat, officers shouted
commands into field radios, giving co-ordinates of
enemy positions. Some 200 marines, fully exposed
to enemy fire and slowed down by their heavy
weapons, bulky ammunition packs and NBC suits, ran
across the road, taking shelter behind a long
brick wall and mounds of earth. A team of snipers
appeared, yards from our vehicle.
The exchange of fire was relentless. We were
pinned down for more than three hours as Iraqis
hiding inside houses and a hospital and behind
street corners fired a barrage of ammunition.
Despite the marines’ overwhelming firepower,
hitting the Iraqis was not easy. The gunmen were
not wearing uniforms and had planned their ambush
well — stockpiling weapons in dozens of houses,
between which they moved freely pretending to be
civilians.
“It’s a bad situation,” said First Sergeant
James Thompson, who was running around with a 9mm
pistol in his hand. “We don’t know who is shooting
at us. They are even using women as scouts. The
women come out waving at us, or with their hands
raised. We freeze, but the next minute we can see
how she is looking at our positions and giving
them away to the fighters hiding behind a street
corner. It’s very difficult to distinguish between
the fighters and civilians.”
Across the square, genuine civilians were
running for their lives. Many, including some
children, were gunned down in the crossfire. In a
surreal scene, a father and mother stood out on a
balcony with their children in their arms to give
them a better view of the battle raging below. A
few minutes later several US mortar shells landed
in front of their house. In all probability, the
family is dead.
The fighting intensified. An Iraqi fighter
emerged from behind a wall of sandbags 500 yards
away from our vehicle. Several times he managed to
fire off an RPG at our positions. Bernize and
other gunners fired dozens of rounds at his
dugout, punching large holes into a house and
lifting thick clouds of dust.
Captain Mike Brooks, commander of Alpha
company, pinned down in front of the mosque,
called in tank support. Armed with only a 9mm
pistol, he jumped out of the back of his AAV with
a young marine carrying a field radio on his back.

Brooks, 34, from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,
had been in command of 200 men for just over a
year. He joined the marines when he was 19 because
he felt that he was wasting his life. He needed
direction, was a bit of a rebel and was impressed
by the sense of pride in the corps.
He is a soft-spoken man, fair but very firm.
Brave too: I watched him sprint in front of enemy
positions to brief some of his junior officers
behind a wall. Behind us, two 68-ton Abrams tanks
rolled up, crushing the barrier separating the
lanes on the highway.
The earth shook violently as one tank, Desert
Knight, stopped in front of our row of AAVS and
fired several 120mm shells into buildings.
A few hundred yards down ambush alley there was
carnage. An AAV from Charlie company was racing
back towards the bridge to evacuate some wounded
marines when it was hit by two RPGs. The heavy
vehicle shook but withstood the explosions.
Then the Iraqis fired again. This time the
rocket plunged into the vehicle through the open
rooftop. The explosion was deadly, made 10 times
more powerful by the ammunition stored in the
back.
The wreckage smouldered in the middle of the
road. I jumped out from the rear hatch of our
vehicle, briefly taking cover behind a wall. When
I reached the stricken AAV, the scene was mayhem.
The heavy, thick rear ramp had been blown open.
There were pools of blood and bits of flesh
everywhere. A severed leg, still wearing a desert
boot, lay on what was left of the ramp among
playing cards, a magazine, cans of Coke and a
small bloodstained teddy bear.
“They are f****** dead, they are dead. Oh my
God. Get in there. Get in there now and pull them
out,” shouted a gunner in a state verging on
hysterical.
There was panic and confusion as a group of
young marines, shouting and cursing orders at one
another, pulled out a maimed body.
Two men struggled to lift the body on a
stretcher and into the back of a Hummer, but it
would not fit inside, so the stretcher remained
almost upright, the dead man’s leg, partly blown
away, dangling in the air.
“We shouldn’t be here,” said Lieutenant
Campbell Kane, 25, who was born in Northern
Ireland. “We can’t hold this. They are trying to
suck us into the city and we haven’t got enough
ass up here to sustain this. We need more tanks,
more helicopters.”
Closer to the destroyed AAV, another young
marine was transfixed with fear and kept
repeating: “Oh my God, I can’t believe this. Did
you see his leg? It was blown off. It was blown
off.”
Two CH-46 helicopters, nicknamed Frogs, landed
a few hundred yards away in the middle of a
firefight to take away the dead and wounded.
If at first the marines felt constrained by
orders to protect civilians, by now the battle had
become so intense that there was little time for
niceties. Cobra helicopters were ordered to fire
at a row of houses closest to our positions. There
were massive explosions but the return fire barely
died down.
Behind us, as many as four AAVs that had driven
down along the banks of the Euphrates were stuck
in deep mud and coming under fire.
About 1pm, after three hours of intense
fighting, the order was given to regroup and try
to head out of the city in convoy. Several marines
who had lost their vehicles piled into the back of
ours.
We raced along ambush alley at full speed,
close to a line of houses. “My driver got hit,”
said one of the marines who joined us, his face
and uniform caked in mud. “I went to try to help
him when he got hit by another RPG or a mortar. I
don’t even know how many friends I have lost. I
don’t care if they nuke that bloody city now. From
one house they were waving while shooting at us
with AKs from the next. It was insane.”
There was relief when we finally crossed the
second bridge to the northeast of the city in
mid-afternoon. But there was more horror to come.
Beside the smouldering wreckage of another AAV
were the bodies of another four marines, laid out
in the mud and covered with camouflage ponchos.
There were body parts everywhere.
One of the dead was Second Lieutenant Fred
Pokorney, 31, a marine artillery officer from
Washington state. He was a big guy, whose
ill-fitting uniform was the butt of many jokes. It
was supposed to have been a special day for
Pokorney. After 13 years of service, he was to be
promoted to first lieutenant. The men of Charlie
company had agreed they would all shake hands with
him to celebrate as soon as they crossed the
second bridge, their mission accomplished.
It didn’t happen. Pokorney made it over the
second bridge and a few hundred yards down a
highway through dusty flatlands before his vehicle
was ambushed. Pokorney and his men had no chance.
Fully loaded with ammunition, their truck exploded
in the middle of the road, its remains burning for
hours. Pokorney was hit in the chest by an RPG.

Another man who died was Fitzgerald Jordan, a
staff sergeant from Texas. I felt numb when I
heard this. I had met Jordan 10 days before we
moved into Nasiriya. He was a character, always
chewing tobacco and coming up to pat you on the
back. He got me to fetch newspapers for him from
Kuwait City. Later, we shared a bumpy ride across
the desert in the back of a Humvee.
A decorated Gulf war veteran, he used to
complain about having to come back to Iraq. “We
should have gone all the way to Baghdad 12 years
ago when we were here and had a real chance of
removing Saddam.”
Now Pokorney, Jordan and their comrades lay
among unspeakable carnage. An older marine walked
by carrying a huge chunk of flesh, so maimed it
was impossible to tell which body part it was.
With tears in his eyes and blood splattered over
his flak jacket, he held the remains of his friend
in his arms until someone gave him a poncho to
wrap them with.
Frantic medics did what they could to relieve
horrific injuries, until four helicopters landed
in the middle of the highway to take the injured
to a military hospital. Each wounded marine had a
tag describing his injury. One had gunshot wounds
to the face, another to the chest. Another simply
lay on his side in the sand with a tag reading:
“Urgent — surgery, buttock.”
One young marine was assigned the job of
keeping the flies at bay. Some of his comrades,
exhausted, covered in blood, dirt and sweat walked
around dazed. There were loud cheers as the sound
of the heaviest artillery yet to pound Nasiriya
shook the ground.
Before last week the overwhelming majority of
these young men had never been in combat. Few had
even seen a dead body. Now, their faces had
changed. Anger and fear were fuelled by rumours
that the bodies of American soldiers had been
dragged through Nasiriya’s streets. Some marines
cried in the arms of friends, others sought
comfort in the Bible.
Next morning, the men of Alpha company talked
about the fighting over MREs (meals ready to eat).
They were jittery now and reacted nervously to any
movement around their dugouts. They suspected that
civilian cars, including taxis, had helped
resupply the enemy inside the city. When cars were
spotted speeding along two roads, frantic calls
were made over the radio to get permission to
“kill the vehicles”. Twenty-four hours earlier it
would almost certainly have been denied: now it
was granted.
Immediately, the level of force levelled at
civilian vehicles was overwhelming. Tanks were
placed on the road and AAVs lined along one side.
Several taxis were destroyed by helicopter
gunships as they drove down the road.
A lorry filled with sacks of wheat made the
fatal mistake of driving through US lines. The
order was given to fire. Several AAVs pounded it
with a barrage of machinegun fire, riddling the
windscreen with at least 20 holes. The driver was
killed instantly. The lorry swerved off the road
and into a ditch. Rumour spread that the driver
had been armed and had fired at the marines. I
walked up to the lorry, but could find no trace of
a weapon.
This was the start of day that claimed many
civilian casualties. After the lorry a truck came
down the road. Again the marines fired. Inside,
four men were killed. They had been travelling
with some 10 other civilians, mainly women and
children who were evacuated, crying, their clothes
splattered in blood. Hours later a dog belonging
to the dead driver was still by his side.
The marines moved west to take a military
barracks and secure their third objective, the
third bridge, which carried a road out of the
city.
At the barracks, the marines hung a US flag
from a statue of Saddam, but Lieutenant-Colonel
Rick Grabowski, the battalion commander, ordered
it down. He toured barracks. There were stacks of
Russian-made ammunition and hundreds of Iraqi army
uniforms, some new, others left behind by fleeing
Iraqi soldiers.
One room had a map of Nasiriya, showing its
defences and two large cardboard arrows indicating
the US plan of attack to take the two main
bridges. Above the map were several murals
praising Saddam. One, which sickened the
Americans, showed two large civilian planes
crashing into tall buildings.
As night fell again there was great tension,
the marines fearing an ambush. Two tanks and three
AAVs were placed at the north end of the third
bridge, their guns pointing down towards Nasiriya,
and given orders to shoot at any vehicle that
drove towards American positions.
Though civilians on foot passed by safely, the
policy was to shoot anything that moved on wheels.
Inevitably, terrified civilians drove at speed to
escape: marines took that speed to be a threat and
hit out. During the night, our teeth on edge, we
listened a dozen times as the AVVs’ machineguns
opened fire, cutting through cars and trucks like
paper.
Next morning I saw the result of this order —
the dead civilians, the little girl in the orange
and gold dress.
Suddenly, some of the young men who had crossed
into Iraq with me reminded me now of their
fathers’ generation, the trigger-happy grunts of
Vietnam. Covered in the mud from the violent
storms, they were drained and dangerously
aggressive.
In the days afterwards, the marines
consolidated their position and put a barrier of
trucks across the bridge to stop anyone from
driving across, so there were no more civilian
deaths.
They also ruminated on what they had done. Some
rationalised it.
“I was shooting down a street when suddenly a
woman came out and casually began to cross the
street with a child no older than 10,” said
Gunnery Sergeant John Merriman, another Gulf war
veteran. “At first I froze on seeing the civilian
woman. She then crossed back again with the child
and went behind a wall. Within less than a minute
a guy with an RPG came out and fired at us from
behind the same wall. This happened a second time
so I thought, ‘Okay, I get it. Let her come out
again’.
She did and this time I took her out with my
M-16.” Others were less sanguine.
Mike Brooks was one of the commanders who had
given the order to shoot at civilian vehicles. It
weighed on his mind, even though he felt he had no
choice but to do everything to protect his marines
from another ambush.
On Friday, making coffee in the dust, he told
me he had been writing a diary, partly for his
wife Kelly, a nurse at home in Jacksonville, North
Carolina, with their sons Colin, 6, and
four-year-old twins Brian and Evan.
When he came to jotting down the incident about
the two babies getting killed by his men he
couldn’t do it. But he said he would tell her when
he got home. I offered to let him call his wife on
my satellite phone to tell her he was okay. He
turned down the offer and had me write and send
her an e-mail instead.
He was too emotional. If she heard his voice,
he said, she would know that something was
wrong.





























 
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GAMES




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