Lest we forget… Four years ago, in March 2017, at least 150 non-combatant men, women and children were killed when US-led coalition bombing destroyed a cluster of houses where a handful of terrorists battling Iraqi forces had positioned themselves on roof-tops in the city of Mosul. The following was Bronterre News’s take on the tragedy
IF, AS IN a bad dream, ground forces were fighting bands of armed terrorists in a heavily populated part of a large European city, would fighter-bombers be called in to support the soldiers? The short answer is never in a million years, because the risk to civilians of bombing a packed residential neighbourhood would be judged far too great.
So why was there a sanctioning of airstrikes against Isis terrorists spread around the crowded al-Jadida residential district of Mosul, Iraq’s second biggest city, which has a civilian population of about 600,000?
According to numerous reports, at least 150 civilians were killed, with children, women and men buried in rubble, when on 17 March US-led coalition bombing destroyed a cluster of houses where a handful of terrorists battling Iraqi forces had positioned themselves on roof-tops. The coalition said later it had launched a formal investigation into reports of civilian casualties.
Just over a year ago, north and west Wales Plaid Cymru MPs Hywel Williams, Jonathan Edwards and Liz Saville Roberts, and Ceredigion Lib Dem Mark Williams, were among 223 MPs to vote against UK airstrikes in Syria because of the risk to civilians.
Voters in Wales dismayed by the fatalities in Mosul – and by the reported deaths of hundreds of civilians in coalition airstrikes in Syria in the last year – should now look to these MPs to raise the profile of public debate about what the UN’s humanitarian coordinator in Iraq has described as “this terrible loss of life”.
However, such debate needs to range a good deal wider, taking into account astute insights by a former head of MI5. In evidence to the Iraq Inquiry in the summer of 2010, Baroness Manningham-Buller, head of the domestic intelligence service between 2002 and 2007, identified a link between radicalisation and Britain’s involvement in the Iraq invasion.
In perceptive testimony now never referred to, she told the inquiry: “Our involvement in Iraq, for want of a better word, radicalised a few among a generation of young people, some of them British citizens who saw our involvement in Iraq, on top of our involvement in Afghanistan, as being an attack on Islam.”
Manningham-Buller said the terrorist threat to the UK from al-Qaeda and other groups “pre-dated” the Iraq invasion and the 9/11 attacks in the US. But she said she was in no doubt that the UK’s participation in the March 2003 invasion of Iraq “substantially” increased the level of terrorist threat to the UK, and she was “not surprised” that UK nationals were involved in the 7/7 suicide attacks in London. A year after the invasion, she said, MI5 was “swamped” by leads about terrorist threats to the UK.
Seven years later, with the UK’s terror threat level at ‘severe’, and conflict in Iraq continuing, the connection she makes between military involvement and radicalisation is something now never mentioned by politicians or mainstream media. Either they’ve simply forgotten about what Eliza Manningham-Buller said, or they remember and have perhaps decided that her analysis, though accurate, is too controversial to be allowed to form part of any current debate. That view would be shortsighted and unwise.
For civilians, the Jadida bombing is thought to have been among the deadliest since the 2003 Iraq invasion.
Chris Woods, director of the monitoring group Airwars, a project run by a team of independent journalists, believes the deaths on 17 March, and anti-Isis air attacks in Syria that have killed hundreds of civilians, have turned public sentiment against the coalition. “We have until recently always credited the coalition with taking care to avoid civilian casualties, compared with the Russians. But since the last months of 2016 you have seen this steep climb in civilian casualties, and public sentiment has turned very sharply against the US-led coalition.”
In the Iraqi push to evict Isis from west Mosul – this vile group’s last major stronghold in Iraq – how important it must be to not risk arousing antagonism amongst ordinary civilians, how important to avoid, as far as possible, any build-up of anti-western feeling with its potential to offer succour to patrons of radicalisation.
Isis must be stamped out. However, a refusal to risk the lives of civilians in Mosul – or anywhere else – through airstrikes is a moral imperative in its own right. All civilians, everywhere, going about their everyday lives have an absolute right to protection from violence. Whether from terrorism in Europe, or from bombing in the Middle East.
Bronterre News 