US: The US army has admitted using white phosphorus as a weapon against insurgents. Tom Clonan finds this practice hard to justify
The Pentagon's admission to the use of white phosphorus weapons by US troops in Iraq as direct-fire incendiary weapons raises serious legal and ethical questions.
Used legitimately, weapons-grade white phosphorus provides conventional munitions with an illumination effect. Exposed to oxygen, white phosphorus spontaneously ignites, burning furiously with an incandescent light and dense white smoke. The luminosity provides tracer bullets with the tell-tale arcs of light that mark their trajectory.
White phosphorus is also used in artillery and rocket-propelled projectiles to provide area illumination and smoke screens. Normally referred to as an "illumination round", a typical shell or missile would be capable of brightly illuminating an area many times the size of Croke Park for up to five minutes. Such projectiles are designed to detonate hundreds of metres above the target area.
Insurgents exposed to the chemical effects of white phosphorus in a confined space would be severely burned. White phosphorus is highly lipid-soluble and on contact with human skin will rapidly burn and strip all soft tissue to the bone. In battlefield conditions, only amputation would stop the spread of this blinding and burning effect.
This use of illumination rounds could be deemed under the Geneva Conventions to be "excessively injurious" and, when deployed in an urban environment, possibly to have "indiscriminate effects".
Provisions in the Geneva Convention on Prohibited Weapons deal specifically with incendiary weapons such as illumination rounds. Under these provisions and the Geneva Conventions in general, the use of such rounds by the US in urban centres like Fallujah - to illuminate the battlefield only - would probably be considered legitimate.
However, the US military in Iraq is equipped with unique,much-vaunted, night vision equipment (NVE) consisting of individualised infra-red goggles for each soldier with weapon sights for small arms and heavy weapons systems. This should give the US military the upper hand in night-time combat and makes illumination rounds unnecessary.
The use of illumination rounds in such circumstances would "blind" or "flare-out" the state of the art NVE systems.
So the use of white phosphorus shells by the US 1st Marine Expeditionary Force during Operation Phantom Fury in Fallujah in November last would appear difficult to justify. What is gravely worrying is the Pentagon's admission that it was used as "an incendiary weapon".
Pentagon spokesman Lieut Col Barry Venable said illumination rounds were used in Fallujah to penetrate and destroy insurgent strongholds and to drive enemy combatants out into the open where they "could be killed with HE" (high explosives).
Given the range of weapons systems available to the 1st MEF in Fallujah, including heavy artillery and close air support, the point-destruction of insurgent strongholds could easily have been achieved using conventional HEdevices.
This unusual deployment of illumination rounds for detonation within buildings leaves the US military open to the accusation that white phosphorus was being used as a chemical or "terror" weapon in Fallujah.
Tom Clonan is a security analyst