1,000 Iraqi Civilians Died in Illegal Attacks, Rights Group Says : Gulf War: Middle East Watch report cites “needless deaths” in allied air raids. Defense Secretary Cheney rejects the allegations.

During 43 days of intense aerial bombardment last winter, the United States and its allies may have killed as many as 1,000 Iraqi civilians and destroyed 240 dwellings in attacks that violated international law, the human rights organization Middle East Watch contends in a report issued eight months after the Persian Gulf War ended.

Those “needless deaths” represent about a third of the 3,000 Iraqi civilians who probably perished in all allied air raids, the group said in a 402-page report released Saturday. And a “substantially larger number of deaths” probably resulted from malnutrition, disease and lack of medical care--the results of other attacks that were planned and conducted in apparent contravention of international laws of war, the report added.

“Despite the technology available to them, the allies violated laws (of war) in several respects, both in the selection of targets and in the choice of means and methods of attack,” said Kenneth Roth, one of the principal authors of the study.

But Defense Secretary Dick Cheney flatly rejected the report’s allegations. In the Gulf War, Cheney said, “we did a better job of (limiting civilian casualties) than in any other. There were, as there always is, a couple of occasions where civilians were killed. But overall, the performance was outstanding.”

Customary international practice generally forbids the disproportionate and indiscriminate use of force in areas where civilians are present and requires states to make a maximum effort to avoid casualties among civilians. But a 1977 international treaty, which outlines these principles, and whose provisions the allies are alleged to have violated by their conduct of the war, has not been ratified by the United States or Iraq. Neither customary practice nor the treaty specifically defines the bounds of legal military operations.

The Middle East Watch tally of Iraqi civilian casualties in the Gulf War yields lower civilian casualty estimates than other independent reports, which set the civilian death toll as high as 15,000. But it is the first to allege that the United States and its allies violated international laws governing the conduct of war.

Middle East Watch, an affiliate of the international Human Rights Watch, has often criticized the Bush Administration’s foreign policy. But Administration officials often cite the group’s charges of human rights abuses when the countries involved are unfriendly to Washington.

Pentagon officials have adamantly refused to estimate the numbers of Iraqi war dead, either military or civilian. At the same time, they have touted their planning and conduct of the war as a model of adherence to international legal standards, which were laid out in the 1949 Geneva Convention. Earlier this year, Cheney defended the U.S. military’s efforts to minimize civilian casualties, saying, “If I had it to do over again, I would do exactly the same thing.”

In an interview last week with The Times, Cheney conceded that “war is never pleasant business. You do your best to minimize casualties to civilians.”

But Middle East Watch contested the Pentagon’s claims that its best efforts were made to avoid civilian casualties. The group also cited several cases in which the allies’ operations violated standards laid out in a U.S. Air Force manual, “International Law: The Conduct of Armed Conflict and Air Operations.”

The human rights group was particularly critical of the allies’ decisions to drop unguided bombs, conduct daytime attacks on populated areas and to not warn civilians of imminent attacks.

But more than in any previous war, the United States and its allies used accurate precision-guided munitions, conducted large numbers of night-time raids and issued warnings to civilians of imminent attacks. But in cases where they did not, the study concluded that the resulting shortcomings “appear to have involved deliberate decisions by allied commanders to take less than the maximum feasible precautions necessary to avoid harm to civilians.”

Most of the civilian injuries detailed in the study have been widely reported. Investigators from Middle East Watch, however, have gathered some new details of many known incidents, based partly on interviews with residents of Iraq of various nationalities who fled to Jordan during the bombing. The report analyzed whether the allies’ actions measure up to the standards demanded by the standards of “customary”--or universally accepted--international law.

According to Roth, the group concluded that between 400 and 600 Iraqi civilian deaths can be attributed to commanders’ decisions to bomb military targets in heavily populated areas during the day rather than at night.

The group alleges that in choosing to strike bridges in Nasiriyah, Fallouja and Samawa during the day, rather than at night when civilian traffic would have been light, air war commanders disregarded a provision of international law requiring them to “take all feasible precautions” to avoid or minimize civilian casualties. Those strikes claimed the lives of more than 330 Iraqi noncombatants, the watchdog group alleges. The Pentagon has said in the past that Navy and British planes less well-equipped with night vision capabilities and guided bombs had to be used for the bridges.

Another daytime raid struck an oil-storage tank near where civilians were lining up to buy fuel for heating and cooking. About 200 people were killed or injured at the site.

The group also stated that if international law had been followed, the allies might have spared the lives of almost 300 Iraqi civilians who perished when a U.S. bomb slammed into a downtown Baghdad air raid shelter. Although Pentagon officials admitted that they knew the facility had been used as a civilian shelter during the Iran-Iraq War, they justified their decision to bomb the so-called Ameriyah shelter because they believed it was being used as a military command center.

“Quite apart from whether there were military communications coming out of the Ameriyah shelter, it is very clear in international law that the Pentagon should have issued a warning that it no longer considered it as a civilian shelter,” Roth said.

The group concluded that other allied decisions appeared to violate other war laws designed to protect civilians, although the effects of the alleged violations were not immediate. The allies’ decision, for example, to target Iraq’s infrastructure devastated its electrical system and food, agricultural and water-treatment facilities. The result is that thousands of Iraqis have suffered and died from disease, hunger and poor medical care.