The Italian television network Rai TG 24 aired a documentary yesterday containing extensive evidence that chemical weapons were used by the United States in last November’s assault on Fallujah. At the time, there were rumors of the United States using chemical weapons but until now there has been no confirmation. According to the documentary, the United States used white phosphorus bombs against civilians and insurgents. The white phosphorus bombs are a type of incendiary bomb that is prohibited for use against civilian targets or against concentrations of civilians who are not acting in a military capacity according to Protocol III of the 1980 Geneva Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons. The United States did not ratify Protocol III.
Thus far, the United States military has confirmed that white phosphorus was used in Fallujah as a means of marking targets, but has denied that it was used against human targets. Yesterday on Democracy Now!, US military spokesperson Lieutenant Colonel Steve Boylan described the documentary as “propaganda, falsehoods, and rumors” and stated that white phosphorus was used to mark targets and destroy weapons caches and that “it is a perfectly legal weapon to use.” The military has not had been pressed on the issue as their has been a significant lack of reporting on the issue in the United States. While the story has been picked up by news agencies around the world, at press time only Reuters has picked up the story in the United States.
The descriptions of the effects of the bombs are horrifying. News agencies are printing descriptions of fully-clothed bodies that have had their skin dissolved, caramelized, or turned into the consistency of leather. A former US soldier described how the bombs kill people:
“Phosphorus burns bodies, in fact it melts the flesh all the way down to the bone ... I saw the burned bodies of women and children. Phosphorus explodes and forms a cloud. Anyone within a radius of 150 meters is done for."
A biologist in Fallujah, Mohamad Tareq, interviewed for the film, says:
"A rain of fire fell on the city, the people struck by this multi-colored substance started to burn, we found people dead with strange wounds, the bodies burned but the clothes intact."
Journalist Dahr Jamil described reports last year from Iraqi civilians:
"The consistent stories that I have been getting have been refugees describing phosphorus weapons, horribly burned bodies, fires that burn on people when they touch these weapons, and they are unable to extinguish the fires even after dumping large amounts of water on the people.
