Report Notes Toll of Cluster Bombs, Strikes in Iraq

Hundreds of civilian deaths could have been averted in the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq if the military had not used two tactics, according to a Human Rights Watch report to be released today.

The use of cluster bombs in populated areas caused more civilian casualties than any other factor, the 147-page report says. In addition, 50 strikes by warplanes targeting Iraqi leaders through intercepts of satellite telephone calls killed dozens of civilians but none of the intended targets, it says.

Indiscriminately bombarding civilian areas violates warfare conventions, said Kenneth Roth, executive director of the New York-based Human Rights Watch. “The basic rule is, you have to know who you’re shooting at,” he said.

On Thursday, a spokesman for the U.S. Central Command, which is responsible for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, said that the military “applied precise methodology and extreme caution in a meticulous process when choosing valid military targets and munitions, including cluster munitions.”

“U.S. Central Command understands that various private and international organizations are very concerned with civilian casualties resulting from decisive combat operations in Operation Iraqi Freedom,” said the spokesman, Marine Maj. Pete Mitchell. “While any civilian casualties of war are a tragedy, coalition forces have taken extreme care in Operation Iraqi Freedom in limiting needless loss of life and collateral damage.”

Three analysts from the rights group spent five weeks retracing the trail of the U.S. troops through 10 cities and interviewing doctors, victims’ families and U.S. and British military officials. The analysts concluded that, aside from the cluster bombs and strikes targeting Iraqi leaders, coalition forces tried to be careful to avoid killing noncombatants.

Roth noted that researchers found a clear contrast between the civilian death rates in planned attacks on fixed sites and in assaults on targets of opportunity. “They were very, very careful and incredibly accurate when it came to planned targets,” he said.

But as U.S. soldiers encountered distant fire on the ground, they shot back with imprecise cluster munitions that carpeted an area with bomblets. “Hundreds of people were killed as a result,” Roth said.

Cluster munitions splinter above their targets and rain down dozens, if not hundreds, of smaller explosive devices -- bomblets, or submunitions.

The Human Rights Watch analysts calculated that more than 1,000 civilians were killed or wounded by cluster bombs and that unexploded bomblets potentially may cause even more deaths. They did not try to ascertain exactly how many civilians died, calling the number “unknowable” because of poor records, some fighters dressed as civilians and an Iraqi Health Ministry clampdown on discussing the issue.

On Wednesday, Iraqi Health Ministry officials ordered a halt to a count of civilian deaths and told workers not to release statistics already compiled, Associated Press reported. A Los Angeles Times survey of civilian deaths in Baghdad after the war found that at least 1,700 noncombatants died in the five weeks after the war began March 20. An Associated Press study documented 3,240 civilian deaths between March 20 and April 20, based on surveys of about half of Iraq’s hospitals.

The Human Rights Watch researchers also visited the sites of four strikes targeting Saddam Hussein and other senior Iraqi leaders. The Pentagon has acknowledged targeting 50 “high-value” targets, often through the global positioning signals emitted by the leaders’ Thuraya satellite telephones. Although the Pentagon says that its intelligence is bolstered by other sources, the signals can pinpoint a location only in about a 100-yard radius, and so residents of neighborhoods where leaders were thought to be sheltered unwittingly became targets as well.

In response to questions about children mistakenly killed this week in air raids in Afghanistan, Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Tuesday that the military took pains to avoid killing innocents.

“There are risks, there are risks any time you go after any target. But I can tell you, the kind of vetting that the process goes through, from the beginnings of intelligence to the final operation, is exquisite,” he said. “And we haven’t been perfect. But I would offer, and would offer again, that both in Afghanistan and Iraq, that the amount of force brought to bear, that the progress that was made, the success we’ve had, has never been done with more care about bringing innocents into the line of fire.”

But Roth, who oversaw similar postwar studies in Yugoslavia and Afghanistan, said the Pentagon knew that it had a problem with cluster bombs. Human Rights Watch found that the Air Force and Marines were using fewer cluster bombs in populated areas, instead augmenting ground troops with close air support.

However, the Army continued to use the cluster shells and missiles heavily in Iraq -- U.S. Central Command reported that its forces used 10,782 cluster munitions overall.

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Times staff writer Esther Schrader in Washington contributed to this report.