US, Iraq Fight Another War over Treatment of POWs

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Tuesday, March 25, 2003

US, Iraq Fight Another War over Treatment of POWs

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After US President George Bush urged Iraq to treat humanely the American soldiers taken prisoner by Iraq during the on-going war, Iraq said on Monday that all the US prisoners of war (POWs) will be treated in accordance with relevant international laws.

These remarks were made after Al Jazeera TV on Sunday broadcast images of five American POWs, including two wounded, one of them a woman. Also shown on the television were several dead bodies, apparently of US soldiers killed in Iraq.

Three of the soldiers, captured alive by Iraqis, including the woman who identified herself as Shauna and a sergeant, were reportedly from New Jersey, the United States.

The bodies shown were wearing bloodstained camouflage uniforms and some appeared to have bullet wounds to the head. The sergeant and the woman said they were from the 507th Maintenance Company.

The sergeant and Shauna were shown being interviewed by Iraqi media. The captured woman soldier looked terrified when interviewed, the Al Jazeera footage showed.

Facing the pressure and shame of his soldiers shown as POWs, President Bush was in a hurry to urge the Iraqis to treat his soldiers well and humanely, and warned that mistreatment to the American soldiers might be a war crime.

"The POWs I expect to be treated humanely, just like we're treating the prisoners that we have captured humanely. If not, the people who mistreat the prisoners will be treated as war criminals," a stern-faced Bush warned in a televised speech.

But Iraqi officials said they were too very concerned about their soldiers taken by the Americans.

Billions of people in the world saw the pictures through CNN when a number of Iraqi soldiers were surrendering to the American troops.

The CNN footage showed the Iraqi soldiers walking to the American troops and forced to go down on their knees.

Iraqi officials said the surrendering soldiers were taken as propaganda tools by the United States to depress the morale of Iraqi troops.

As US troops are fighting their way towards Baghdad, they are to face increasingly tougher resistance put up by Iraqi forces and would have to be braced for higher casualties.

"United States Marines were ... sustaining a number of killed and wounded in the sharpest engagement of the war thus far," U.S. Lieutenant General Abizaid said Monday when talking about fighting around Nassiriya, a southern Iraqi city where American and Iraqi forces were engaging in fierce fighting.

Earlier on Sunday, an Iraqi eyewitness also told Xinhua that two British pilots were found hiding on the shrubby west bank of the Tigris River in Baghdad and were handed over to Iraqi officials after their warplane was shot down by Iraq's anti-aircraft artillery fire.

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