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10 of 29 DOCUMENTS Associated Press Worldstream April 20, 2003 Sunday

Changing rules: Warning shots and civilian deaths at a Baghdad bridge

BYLINE: ELLEN KNICKMEYER; Associated Press Writer SECTION: INTERNATIONAL NEWS LENGTH: 1508 words DATELINE: BAGHDAD, Iraq On alert against suicide attacks, the Marines guarding the newly taken Tigris River tributary crossing into Baghdad had new orders: Fire shots to warn off any who approach - and kill them if they keep coming. As the assault on the capital began, the Iraqis kept coming. And, at the hands of the Marines with machine guns, they died. A plump woman in pink sandals under a black chador lay collapsed over a pot of stew, shot dead with two white-haired men in a van. A doddering old man with a cane, hobbling oblivious into the warning shots, then fusillade of fire, crumpled dead on the sidewalk. The Associated Press witnessed the taking of the bridge and the immediate toll: the killing of at least a dozen unarmed civilians in just the first few hundred yards (meters) into Baghdad. Inspection afterward of the bullet-pierced vans, taxis, pickups and sedans revealed a single, paunchy Iraqi in uniform sprawled over his steering wheel - the sole Iraqi military casualty evident among the fly-covered dead. Civilians at checkpoints and on the front lines posed one of the most difficult quandaries in this conflict. The rules of engagement - the conditions an armed force sets on its own troops about when to fire - changed after suicide attacks took American lives. The rules are for the troops, not the civilians, and they don't disclose them to the enemy. On the taking of this bridge on April 7, a crucial path into Baghdad, the 3rd Battalion, 4th Marines - one of the war's most active units - had casualties of their own. Two Marines had died just minutes before, when a shell ripped through the top of their armored vehicle. Throughout the few weeks of this war, many of the dozens of U.S. casualties came from attackers posing as civilians. On Wednesday, March 26, Iraqis armed with AK-47 rifles charged soldiers from a bus near Nasiriyah. On March 29, four American soldiers died at a checkpoint when a taxi drove up, the driver waved to troops for help and then the car exploded. At the Baghdad crossing eight days later, two civilian survivors told The Associated Press they heard no warning shots and knew nothing about the concept of warning shots. They didn't even know what struck them. "It was like a great bomb hit us," said Sabah Hassan, a chef at Baghdad's Al-Rashid Hotel. Hassan and Adef Khalat, a mechanic, spoke beside the newly dug grave of a man traveling with them that day. Hassan had been heading to the countryside to check on friends. Marines fired on his car, and all four men inside scrambled out. Marines held their fire to let them escape. Shot in the arm, one of the four bled to death in hiding overnight. "Nobody knew they were there," Hassan said of the Marines. "If I knew, I would not have gone." Human rights groups acknowledge the U.S. military's challenge.

Page 2 Changing rules: Warning shots and civilian deaths at a Baghdad bridge Associated Press Worldstream April 20, 2003 Sunday Fighting an enemy that adopts civilian disguise, "it's difficult to balance force protection with the protection of civilians," said Reuben Brigety at New York-based Human Rights Watch. "But it's still important not to transfer the risk to civilians from armed combatants," Brigety said. The Geneva Conventions, international rules of war adopted after World War II, prohibit combatants from disguising themselves as civilians for the purpose of attack. Still, the conventions also demand that commanders take appropriate measures regarding civilians - not only to spare them, but so civilians "know what's going on (and) what they need to do," said Kim Gordon-Bates, a spokesman for the Red Cross. The agency is the guardian of the conventions. Were warning shots enough for civilians to understand? Brigety wonders. The U.S. military, he said, has an indifferent record of investigating civilian deaths. The military said it investigates cases of killings of unarmed civilians, including whether the Geneva Conventions - or rules of engagement - were violated. Earlier in the conflict, pamphlets dropped into Iraq warned noncombatants to stay in their homes and not to "interfere" in coalition operations. U.S. forces broadcast information over coalition radio, though how many heard that is unclear. At the bridge battle, a U.S. Humvee equipped with a loudspeaker warned people in Arabic to stay indoors, but it didn't enter the area until hours after the first Marines went across. In Doha, Qatar, headquarters of U.S. Central Command, Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks said troops are following the Geneva Conventions - including using a variety of means to try to warn innocents to approach troops and checkpoints slowly. Capt. Stewart Upton, a spokesman at headquarters, said rules of engagement are flexible and battlefield commanders were notified after suicide attacks so they could take measures to protect their troops. Weeks past the Baghdad battle, Marines still fire warning shots toward civilians who come within the comfort zone. Last week in Mosul, as many as 17 Iraqis died from American guns. U.S. commanders said some of the Iraqis were trying to storm a U.S. position, and other incidents involved suspected bank robbers; some civilians said the troops fired indiscriminately upon innocent Iraqis. "That Mercedes, that wouldn't stop," Capt. Kevin Norton of the 3rd Battalion said on the edge of Baghdad April 7. Norton, his face grimed with weeks of travel and battle, spoke as his men tended a 4-year-old girl with a cleanly bandaged foot, hit in a Marine fusillade that had just orphaned her. The girl's mother and father, traveling in a Mercedes, had kept inexorably rolling forward toward the Marines - first into warning shots, then into the machine-gun fire. "Do I in my mind know if this guy had warning, or if he doesn't realize it?" Norton asked. "They know they're getting shot at, and there's nothing we can do about it." "Saddam created that rule of engagement," the captain said. "Once you start putting your people in civilian clothes, with car bombs - once that (happens), we have to change our own rules of engagement." The rules for the 3rd Battalion changed after the first killings of American troops by Iraqi fighters pretending to surrender: Troops in an engagement could fire on anyone in uniform or any civilian with a weapon. Most Marines of the battalion had appeared to take pains to spare civilians. Even under attack, they shouted out to each other to hold fire when a vague figure in the distance turned out to be a woman or child. The rules appeared to change again as the Marines entered Baghdad. The Iraqis had promised a tenacious defense and military strategists warned of urban combat. "Wait until they get up to the sandbags," an officer yelled at the Tigris River tributary crossing on April 7. "After you give the final warning shot, shoot them dead." The men listening had just stormed on foot across a bridge shattered by Iraqi explosives and they lay belly down now on the Baghdad side of the bridge.

Page 3 Changing rules: Warning shots and civilian deaths at a Baghdad bridge Associated Press Worldstream April 20, 2003 Sunday The Iraqis kept coming - in taxis, cars, vans and pickups. Warning shot. Warning shot. Rat-tat-tat-tat. In most cases, it seemed the Marines with machine guns were too far away to be able to distinguish whether the travelers they were shooting were soldiers or civilians - until they rolled from their car doors, dying. Other targets seemed clearer: the old man with a cane, disoriented, walking on as three or four warning shots turned to a barrage. In coming hours, cane beside him, the corpse was coated in dust from shelling. Later, an officer ordered a sniper to handle the warnings. That transformed the loud machine-gun blasts into precisely aimed shooting - warning shots, then rounds that hit the tires, then the engine block, and only then, the windshield. With more time, more drivers realized what was going on, and reversed out of danger. "You guys showed no mercy," another officer said approvingly, as he walked later among the rows of Marine riflemen before the road lined with bullet-shattered cars and slumped travelers. From April 6-8, the routine played out repeatedly as Marines encountered civilians. -A van, tumbled down in a Tigris River tributary; the man and woman inside had scrambled from the water when shots sent their vehicle plunging, only to be felled by a shell as they reached a courtyard door, journalists who witnessed the incident said. -A bus, windows shattered to pebbles of glass; marines had opened fire on its occupants, who turned out to include several women and children, said Lt. Col. B.P. McCoy, commander of the 3rd Battalion. Two aboard died, McCoy said. Finally, on April 8, the 3rd Battalion cruised virtually unchallenged into the center of Baghdad, still on high alert. Riflemen riding in the top hatch of armored vehicles kept weapons trained on approaching cars. At the last second, sometimes, the cars gave way. "Combat hold," Marine Maj. Carl Maas called out to the men in his amphibious vehicle - yet another new rule of engagement that had just come down to company commanders. Maas explained to his tired crew what the new order meant: "No one fires unless fired upon." LOAD-DATE: April 21, 2003 LANGUAGE: ENGLISH Copyright 2003 Associated Press All Rights Reserved