The Al-Amiriyah Shelter
Tragic accident or war crime?
On 12th February 1991, Walid William Esho drove his forty-five-year-old mother to the public shelter numbered twenty-five. The bunker was in Western Baghdad. Families often stayed there to take cover from the aerial attacks of the US in Operation Desert Storm.
Like most single eighteen-year-old boys, he did not stay with his mother but went on his way, leaving her with many other families spending the night. It was the last time Walid saw his mother alive.
Early Hours
In the early hours of the morning, two laser-guided bombs slammed down onto the concrete and steel bunker. They pierced the roof and incinerated hundreds of civilians beyond recognition.
The bombing of the Al-Amiriyah shelter remains one of the deadliest incidents of civilian casualties in Iraq. At the time, the US stated that their intelligence was that the bunker was a command centre for military aggression against them.
The facts do not support this information.
Intelligence
The US had gathered their information through satellites. The residents of the Amiryah areas stated that although intelligence had entered the bunkers, it was clear that families with children were the primary users of the bunker.
The US had ample time and ability to identify them as civilians. Four hundred civilians died in the attack. The majority of them were women, children and older people. Most were asleep when the bombs fell on them.
Were the US guilty of a war crime, or was this, at best, a colossal intelligence failure?
Legal Standpoint
An attack on a civilian shelter would constitute a breach of International Humanitarian Law (IHL) and be considered a war crime.
During the fourth Geneva Convention in 1949, essential obligations were set out for all countries to protect civilian populations during armed conflict.
Article 52 states that you must protect civilian objects; the definition of this term includes shelters, which would point to a breach of law by the US.
This is taken further in Article 57, which states that attackers must do everything feasible to protect civilians. This includes warning civilians so they can evacuate the area.
Amiriyah Shelter
If we apply these rules to the shelter, the US likely did not satisfy its legal obligation under these laws. The US knew that the shelter was used for civilians before the attack.
The shelter was also in a civilian neighbourhood, and children were frequently seen playing around it. The attack would injure civilians even if it were a control base, which meant the US should have warned those who were using it.
Attacks should be proportional to the anticipated benefit, but this was not.
Guilty or not
At best, the careless actions of the US caused the death of four hundred innocent people. At worst, it was a violation of IHL law and a war crime.
Either way, a full investigation was never carried out, and the US has never been held accountable for its actions. This situation continued to hold during the 2003 Iraq invasions and has still not been satisfied today.
Tareq Mandalawi of the Martyrs Foundation, an Iraqi government body, says steps are being taken to issue compensation to the families of civilians killed in the 1990s but did not elaborate on whether the victims of the Amiriyah attack would be included.
The Geneva International Centre for Justice has appealed to the United Nations to bring justice to the people of Iraq by carrying out a full investigation against the US. For obvious reasons, the UN has not started this process to date.
