Banned Weapons: Wars Provide US with Testing Grounds

The issue has been a debate case for experts and politicians over the past decades, with each global power accusing the opposite side of breaching the accords surrounding the internationally-banned weapons.

In a recent case, some Russian lawmakers accused the US of using banned arms in the Syrian war, vowing to raise the case in the international organizations. According to media reports, the Russian parliamentarians have called for an urgent investigation by the UN’s Organization of Prohibition of Chemical Weapons into the use of white phosphorus bombs by the US-led military alliance in Syria during the air campaign.

Konstantin Kosachov, the chairman of Foreign Affairs Committee at the Russian Federation Council, said on Saturday that Russia asked the UN to launch a probe into the use of white phosphorus in Syria by the Western coalition.

The demand by the Russian official comes while Syria’s local sources have said that the American fighter jets dropped white phosphorus bombs on a couple of areas in Hajin town, which is part of Deir ez-Zor province in the east of the country. The social media activists supported the local reports by images of the use of the toxic and incendiary bombs by the US military in the town.

The conventions on the prohibition of banned weapons and US violations

The first string of rules on the use of weaponry in the wars was approved early in 20th century. Over 40 countries held two conferences on the issue in The Hague in 1907. As the first conference set the foundation for the rules, the second conference came to fruition as the war rules were approved. The meeting gathered together delegations from 44 countries. At the end of the road, the participants agreed 13 conventions on a range of issues, including the principles of war, peaceful settlement of international disputes, and the rights and duties of the neutral nations in the war. Some of the conventions are still in use to date.

The two summits imposed a set of bans on the use of some of weapons. For example, incendiary bombs, poisonous gas rockets, and balloon-thrown bombs were prohibited. To give a picture of the American breach of the international laws on the banned weapons, we need to first elaborate on the international conventions and treaties on such weapons.

According to international law, the banned weapons fall into two categories: conventional and unconventional weapons. As The Hague and Geneva conventions define, the unconventional weapons include any weapon with an incalculable range of destruction that causes uncleanable contamination and heavily affect the environment and inflict huge losses on humans. The examples of such weapons are the nuclear, chemical, biological, radioactive weapons. So far, the chemical weapons have been massively used by various countries, but nuclear bombs so far were used only by the US. In the last year of the WWII, 1945, Americans dropped two bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and reduced them to rubles.

But the prohibition of conventional weapons is the biggest obsession of the international community as they are more accessible and subject to the larger possibility of use. The conventional weapons themselves fall into two categories: the normal and the banned ones. According to the Geneva convention, approved in 1980, some specific conventional weapons are outlawed. This treaty bans weapons that are excessively injurious and have indiscriminate effects. The same treaty later banned the use of bombs delivering white phosphorus by an additional protocol. The agreement, formally known Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, also prohibited the use of napalm, an incendiary mixture of a gelling agent and a volatile petrochemical. In 2008, the CCCW also banned the use of cluster bombs in war. Up to July 2017, 108 countries signed the cluster bombs ban.

But, on the ground, this convention looks invalid in the eyes of the American leaders and decision-makers. Since the WWII, the US military used the banned arms in various conflicts, looking quite careless about how disastrously they constitute crimes against humanity.

Tracking US record of banned weapons use

The use of the outlawed weapons in Syria is not new to the US military policy. The country has a long list of such uses in the past. These weapons first were used in the Vietnam war. Over 20 years, from 1955 to 1975, the Americans dropped a wide range of banned weaponry, including the napalm and cluster bombs, to destroy the Vietnamese villages, forests, and troops shelters.

Then came two new wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan in the early 2000s. The US-headed West invaded Afghanistan under the ruse of fighting terrorism in 2001, and then expanded the invasion to include Iraq, which became a target to a massive military campaign in 2003 under the excuse of developing nuclear weapons by Saddam Hussein. During their operations in the two countries, the Americans used various banned weapons– laser bombs, sonic boom, and depleted uranium bombs.

In mid-April 2017, a US bomber dropped in Afghanistan's Nangarhar province “Mother of All Bombs”, or MOAB, the world’s largest non-nuclear bomb in what many experts condemned as a violation of international law.

In Syria, where a war has been on since 2011, the US admits that they used banned weapons to protect their local allies. In 2017, their jets bombed Raqqa's western suburbs, killing 17 civilians. The coalition accepted that it used white phosphorus in the air raid.

In general, the form of the US use of illegal weapons in the West Asia region over the past decades indicates that the American leaders turned the region into their weapons testing ground. Massive killings of the civilians have become a commonplace event, with the media giving the least coverage. West Asia's nations have fallen victim to a barbarous war machine of Washington not afraid to squash the human rights to advertise and sell more weapons.