One Downing Street press officer described the death of the Queen Mother as a “very good day to bury bad news”. Well the story about the brave US forces rescueing the starving Iraqis from the torture cells run by the Iraqi <s> evil dictator Saddam</s> errrr…. Badr Brigade militia aligned to the new government (as diaried by Oui) makes it a very good day to bury another story.
Despite the US Ambassador to the UK denying the story earlier in the day, the Pentagon subsequently confirmed the earlier reports that the US had used white phosphorous as a weapon during the assault on Falluja. The use even has one of those nice innocent sounding names. The combination of firing phosphorous to flush out insurgents and high explosives to finish them off is quaintly called “shake and bake”
For those unfamiliar with the facts on white phosphorous will find them in a box on the BBC report
Spontaneously flammable chemical used for battlefield illumination
Contact with particles causes burning of skin and flesh
Use of incendiary weapons prohibited for attacking civilians (Protocol III of Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons)
Protocol III not signed by US [or UK whose rules of use forbid it being deployed in areas where there are civilians]
So how was Falluja “baked and shaken”?
The US-led assault on Falluja – a stronghold of the Sunni insurgency west of Baghdad – displaced most of the city’s 300,000 population and left many of its buildings destroyed.
Col Venable told the BBC’s PM radio programme that the US army used white phosphorus incendiary munitions “primarily as obscurants, for smokescreens or target marking in some cases”.
“However it is an incendiary weapon and may be used against enemy combatants.”
And he said it had been used in Falluja, but it was “conventional munition”, not a chemical weapon.
It is not “outlawed or illegal”, Col Venable said.
“When you have enemy forces that are in covered positions that your high explosive artillery rounds are not having an impact on and you wish to get them out of those positions, one technique is to fire a white phosphorus round or rounds into the position because the combined effects of the fire and smoke – and in some case the terror brought about by the explosion on the ground – will drive them out of the holes so that you can kill them with high explosives,” he said.
There are different views on whether white phosphorous is a chemical weapon. Judge for yourself from this description of the effect on the human body from the BBC report:
White phosphorus is highly flammable and ignites on contact with oxygen. If the substance hits someone’s body, it will burn until deprived of oxygen.
Globalsecurity.org, a defence website, says: “Phosphorus burns on the skin are deep and painful… These weapons are particularly nasty because white phosphorus continues to burn until it disappears… it could burn right down to the bone.”
Update [2005-11-15 23:17:37 by Londonbear]:The site for the Italian broadcaster RAI has some very disturbing pictures of the effects of white phosphorous in Falluja. This is the link but I will re-iterate that the pictures are very graphic and a later one clearly shows an incinerated baby. Use the link “successiva >>” to scroll through the gallery.
