Captured Iraqi militia fighters may be sent to Guantanamo Bay

Hundreds face trip to al-Qaida suspects' camp
US military officials have admitted they may send some of the prisoners captured in the Iraq war to the American detention camp at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.

American marines at the city of Nassiriya have already rounded up more than 300 suspected paramilitaries dressed in civilian clothes and are keeping them separately from regular Iraqi army prisoners, the Washington Post said yesterday.

The paper said US officials might send them to join the 660 al-Qaida and Taliban suspects being held at Guantanamo Bay. Conditions at the prison camp there have been strongly criticised by human rights organisations as breaching international law.

British and American officials are divided over the fate of the thousands of Iraqi militia fighters who have put up fierce resistance. Britain's most senior commander in the war said that he would want Iraqi prisoners to face a war crimes court.

Regular Iraqi soldiers are likely to be allowed home after the war. There is now a debate about whether the militia fighters should appear before the newly created international criminal court or be sent straight to Guantanamo Bay.

"This is the nub of the difficulty," a senior British military source said yesterday. Although Britain has endorsed the international criminal court, the US has not.

Air Marshal Brian Burridge, commander of British forces in Iraq, said that prisoners guilty of war crimes, even if they were paramilitaries, should appear in court.

"I do have a passionate personal belief that the only way to deal with asymmetric warfare and this sort of irregular behaviour is to use the war crimes process," Air Marshal Burridge said at the weekend. "I think that is an important and powerful way of dealing with it. That is my personal view but it is not me who makes the decisions; it is for ministers, politicians and wiser people than me."

He said all prisoners should be treated as prisoners of war at first. "The way you deal with it practically is you first assume the irregulars are prisoners of war, then ultimately you discover they are not and then we will want to treat them separately," he said.

Four thousand Iraqi prisoners have been captured; most of them are being held at a British-built camp in Umm Qasr, on the Iraqi border.

All were being held together for now under the rules of the Geneva convention, the British military source said. "We just hold them in accordance with the Geneva convention. What happens after that is a different issue," the source added.

But US military officials told the Washington Post they were taking a more aggressive approach when dealing with civilians who they thought might be militia fighters.

"You round them up - that way they're not a threat," a senior marine officer told the newspaper.

Officers admit the new tactics will do little to win the sympathy of the Iraqi population but say they have little choice because of the tactics employed by the militias.

"If we get a few who are innocent, I'm sorry, but we can't just let them go out there and start shooting at us again," one senior US officer told the newspaper.

Hearings will be held in Iraq to determine whether the prisoners will be held as prisoners of war or declared "illegal combatants".

"We're still figuring this out because we thought we'd have mass surrenders, not this crap," the senior officer said.

All fighters are deemed to be "combatants", though the irregular paramilitaries may later be identified as "unlawful combatants", as al-Qaida and Taliban fighters were during the war in Afghanistan.

British military officials said "terrorist" suspects should face a proper legal process. "There is a strong feeling in the British contingent that we are sending a message out to people in the al-Qaida fraternity that everyone who engages in that sort of terror needs to know there is a proper legal system that will see them locked up for the rest of their lives."

Iraqi militia fighters are from three main groups: the Saddam Fedayeen, the Secret Security Organisation and the Ba'ath party militia.

Since the war began the vocabulary used by American generals to describe these fighters has changed markedly.

Early last week generals stopped using the word Fedayeen, which means "someone willing to sacrifice", and began calling them "irregulars". Now they describe them as "terrorist death squads" and stress the "terrorist-like" tactics they use.

In addition, General Richard Myers, chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, said on Sunday that the Iraqi regime had still not allowed the International Committee of the Red Cross access to American prisoners of war being held in Iraq. At least five American servicemen and women are being held as prisoners and several more are reported missing.

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