A woman waits of the release of her husband from U.S. military detention

Amnesty International blamed the death of scores of civilians on “excessive use of force” by U.S. troops. It said others were killed by gunmen or in disputed circumstances.

For example, U.S. soldiers have shot and killed scores of Iraqi demonstrators in several incidents, including seven in Mosul on 15 April 2003 and at least 15 in Fallujah on 29 April.

The group said that some of the 10,402 claims were filed concerning incidents in which U.S. soldiers had shot dead or seriously wounded Iraqi civilians with no apparent cause.

The report said that no U.S. soldier has been prosecuted for illegally killing an Iraqi civilian.

Iraqi courts, because of an order issued by the U.S.-led authority in Baghdad in June, are forbidden from hearing cases against U.S. soldiers or any other foreign troops or foreign officials in Iraq , it added.

“In effect, U.S. soldiers are operating with total impunity,” read the report, adding that American occupation forces changed the country’s penal code to that effect.

On 14 May, two U.S. armed vehicles broke through the perimeter wall of the home of Sa'adi Suleiman Ibrahim al-'Ubaydi in Ramadi. Soldiers beat him with rifle butts and then shot him dead as he tried to flee, the report said.

The report also referred to the civilian deaths in attacks reportedly carried out by gunmen.

The armed men have targeted the U.S. military, Iraqi security personnel, Iraqi-controlled police stations, religious leaders and buildings, media workers, non-governmental organizations and U.N. agencies, it said.

Torture & Ill-treatment

Since the invasion began, AI said it has been receiving reports of Iraqis who have been taken into detention by U.S. forces and “whose rights have been violated”.

“Many have been held without charge for weeks or months. Some have been tortured and ill-treated. Virtually none has had prompt access to a lawyer, their family or judicial review of their detention”.

“The Americans said they were taking [my sons] off for an hour of questioning. We have not seen them since,” a 65-year-old Amal Salim Madi, whose three sons were arrested in October, said in December while joining a demonstration in Baghdad demanding rights for detainees.

The report said the detainees are not ending up in mass graves, “as many did under the former Iraqi government, but they are lost to their families”.

“Iraq has turned into one big Guantanamo”, Adil Allami, a lawyer with the Human Rights Organization of Iraq, said in October 2003, referring to the U.S. military camp in Cuba where hundreds of individuals remain held without charge amid international consternation.

Different Methods

The report said that many detainees were tortured and ill-treated by U.S. and British troops

The report said that many detainees have said they were tortured and ill-treated by U.S. and British troops during interrogation.

Methods often reported include prolonged sleep deprivation; beatings; prolonged restraint in painful positions, sometimes combined with exposure to loud music; prolonged hooding; and exposure to bright lights, it added.

The suffering of Abdallah Khudhran al-Shamran, a Saudi Arabian national, is one case in point documented by the report.

Shamran was arrested in al-Rutba in early April 2003 by US and allied Iraqi forces while traveling from Syria to Baghdad .

“On reaching an unknown site, he said he was beaten, given electric shocks, suspended by his legs, had his penis tied and was subjected to sleep deprivation,” said the report.

It underlined that such reports of torture or other ill-treatment by U.S. forces have been frequent in the past year.

U.S. forces published a list of 8,500 detainees on the Internet. Most are being held indefinitely and without charge as “suspected terrorists” or “security” detainees.

The report said families waiting outside Abu Ghraib prison say most of their relatives were picked up in indiscriminate raids.

House Demolitions

The Amnesty International also slammed the U.S. military policy of house demolitions, a feature frequently used by Israeli occupation forces during raids of Palestinian territories.

On November 10 last year, U.S. soldiers arrived at the farmhouse of the Najim family near the town of al-Mahmudiya, south of Baghdad .

They ordered everyone who lived there to leave within 30 minutes. Soon afterwards, two F-16 warplanes bombed and destroyed the farmhouse, said the report.

The report also said that ordinary Iraqis also felt the pinch in other forms - whether “it be looting, revenge killings, kidnappings or violent sexual crimes”.

“In the aftermath of war, women and girls have increasingly faced violent attacks, including abduction, rape and murder, as a result of the breakdown of law and order,” read the report.

The report concluded that the occupying forces and the American-selected Iraqi Governing Council must make a real commitment to protecting and promoting the full range of human rights.

This is for the next year to be better than the last, the group hoped.