- KUWAIT (Reuters) - The United
States admits it has used them in Iraq; Britain says it has them, but would
not use them in built-up areas; Iraq says they have killed dozens of civilians;
and human rights groups insist they should be banned.
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- Cluster bombs are deadly but unpredictable -- each contain
over 200 bomblets the size of a drinks can which scatter over an area the
size of two soccer fields, most exploding on impact and capable of tearing
through quarter of an inch of steel.
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- Human rights groups fear they will soon overtake land
mines as the most lethal legacy of war. Amnesty International said at least
five percent are 'dud' bomblets and fail to explode on impact, effectively
turning them into anti-personnel mines.
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- Iraqi Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf accused
U.S. forces on Thursday of dropping cluster bombs on the Douri residential
area of Baghdad, killing 14 people and wounding 66.
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- A day earlier, Dr. Sadid Moussawi, at a hospital in the
medieval city of Hilla, 100 km (62 miles) south of Baghdad, said 33 Iraqi
civilians had been killed and more than 300 wounded in U.S. air raids on
a residential area using cluster bombs.
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- "They are using cluster bombs," Moussawi said.
"We can tell from the distribution of shrapnel."
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- The U.S. military said on Wednesday its B-52 bombers
had dropped new precision-guided 1,000-pound (454 kg) cluster bombs on
Iraqi tanks defending Baghdad, but did not say where the attack took place.
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- And they insisted that, while they reserve the right
to use these new cluster bombs in combat, they would never target civilians
with them.
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- British military officials denied on Thursday media reports
they had fired L20 artillery cluster shells around the southern city of
Basra.
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- Military spokesman Colonel Chris Vernon said: "We
are not using cluster munitions, for obvious collateral damage reasons,
in and around Basra. It's not worth our while doing that."
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- The controversial weapons dropped by the U.S. B52s are
new and upgraded versions of older munitions, adapted to allow for wind
and weather conditions to make them more accurate.
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- After they are dropped, they open up in the air and disperse
bomblets by parachute. The bomblet packages are designed to land more precisely
on intended target areas.
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- CALL FOR BAN
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- Amnesty International UK demanded on Wednesday a moratorium
on the use of cluster bombs in heavily populated areas.
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- "The use of cluster bombs in an attack on a civilian
area of Hilla constitutes an indiscriminate attack and a grave violation
of international humanitarian law," it said in a statement.
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- Amnesty said the type of cluster bomblets used in the
Hilla attack was BLU97 A/B. Each canister contains over 200 bomblets.
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- According to one estimate, U.S. forces dropped over 50
million cluster bombs in the 1991 Gulf War. They were also used in air
campaigns over Kosovo and Afghanistan. Thousands of unexploded bomblets
remain in Iraq and Kuwait from the Gulf War.
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- By the end of last year, close to 2,000 people in Kuwait
had died or been seriously maimed by bomblets and other explosive leftovers
from the war, said the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fund, which campaigns
against land mines.
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- Richard Lloyd, director of Land mine Action, said dropping
cluster bombs on Iraq "contradicts any government claim to minimize
civilian casualties."
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- "Cluster weapons are prone to missing their targets
and killing civilians.
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- "There is also the added problem that cluster bombs
produce large numbers of unexploded bomblets which effectively turn into
land mines, ready to detonate on contact, causing death and injury to civilians
and ground forces," he said.
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- Andrew Purkis, Chief Executive of the Diana Fund, said:
"It's appalling that, despite the well-documented problems with cluster
weapons, the U.S. and U.K. are dropping them on Iraq."
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