You do not need to imagine the fear of a 15-year-old boy struggling to keep his head above water. It is set out explicitly in the testimony of one of the British soldiers who forced Ahmed Jabbar Kareem Ali into an Iraqi canal: the teenager was panicking, he said. And still the four men turned their backs and drove away as he drowned.
Sir George Newman, the judge holding inquest-style hearings into Iraqi civilian deaths following the 2003 invasion, has excoriated the “clumsy, ill-directed and bullying” conduct of the soldiers, who had detained Ahmed for looting. They should not have ordered the terrified youth into the water and “could and should” have rescued him as he floundered. Though cleared of manslaughter by a court martial, they bear moral responsibility for his death. But they do not bear it alone.
Soldiers were expected to control the looting – but never told how, still less trained to do so. As the occupying power in south-east Iraq, Britain was responsible for maintaining law and order. The Chilcot inquiry disclosed that the joint intelligence committee and defence intelligence staff had warned of the danger of mass lawlessness; and that Tony Blair and the Ministry of Defence recognised the seriousness of the risk. Yet the chief of the defence staff issued no instructions, even when pressed on the issue twice by the chief of joint operations.
As the scale of the problem became clear, overwhelmed troops in Basra were actively instructed not to use arrest as the standard response, a soldier told the hearing – but they received only limited guidance on alternatives. Platoons developed ad hoc methods of dealing with offenders. That they included pushing looters into water was no secret, as witnesses made clear.
Ahmed’s death is traceable to the original sin: the secrecy and lack of planning in the run-up to the invasion, laid bare by the Chilcot report. The consequences were entirely predictable. British troops died because they were ill-equipped and ill-prepared and Iraqi lives were even cheaper, being barely noticed. Sir John Chilcot found that more time was spent deciding which department should have responsibility for calculating Iraqi civilian deaths than finding out the actual number.
The MoD has finally said sorry for the teenager’s death and has promised to use Sir George’s findings to ensure such cases do not occur again. We should not count on that. These hearings have happened only because the families of victims and their lawyers fought hard and persistently for proper investigation. There is a long and inglorious history of abuses by British troops being first denied, then dismissed as the work of a few bad apples, and finally, much later and after sustained pressure, acknowledged as far broader problems and, perhaps, apologised for. Often the truth emerges after decades.
By these standards, the current inquiries are timely. But 13 years is still too long to wait for a detailed accounting of your child’s death, and Ahmed’s family should not have to wait any longer for a fuller explanation of the forces behind it. Sir George has already said he is likely to investigate what happened at a policy level and in high command. Everything possible should be done to encourage and facilitate that, not only for families like Ahmed’s, but also because it is the only way to prevent such abuses in the future.
