Commander says sorry for ordering troops to move dead Iraq insurgents

Major-General Andrew Kennett, now retired, tells al-Sweady inquiry he understands how order left his men distressed

A senior British commander in Iraq has apologised for the impact on his soldiers of an order to remove the bodies of Iraqis from the battlefield after a fierce fight with insurgents.

“I understand that it had been particularly distressing,” retired major-general Andrew Kennett, commander of a British brigade based in south-east Iraq at the time, told a public inquiry into the incident. “It caused a great deal of distress to an awful lot of people.”

Kennett was giving evidence to the al-Sweady inquiry, named after an 19-year-old Iraqi killed during a ferocious gunfight in what became known as the Battle of Danny Boy, a British checkpoint north of Basra, on 14 May 2004. The inquiry in London has heard how British soldiers were traumatised, and were still suffering, after being told to remove bodies, mutilated by high velocity weapons, to the nearby British base, Camp Abu Naji (CAN).

The order to remove the bodies, unprecedented according to the soldiers involved, was given to see if any of the dead Iraqis could be identiifed as Bravo 1, the codename given to Naseer Zachra Abd Rufeiq. Rufeiq was suspected of being the ringleader of a group of Iraqi insurgents who killed six British military police officers in the nearby town of Majar-al-Kabir a year earlier.

British soldiers have broken down when asked at the inquiry about how they dealt with picking up the bodies of 20 dead Iraqis, with some human organs falling away, and piling them into Warrior armoured vehicles and Land Rovers before returning to base.

The order to remove the bodies was justified and had “unfortunate consequences that could not have been foreseen at the time”, Kennett’s chief of staff, major – now colonel – Jonathan Biggart, told the inquiry earlier on Tuesday.

He was referring to the “psychological impact” on both the soldiers and on the Iraqi families already hostile to the troops in their country. The area around Majar-al-Kabir was a recruiting ground for the Shia militia led by Moqtada al-Sadr.

Asked about the effect on the soldiers and whether it occured to him that the order would be used by Iraqi propagandists and inflame hostility, Biggart replied that these “could be considered to be disadvantages”.

However, he added that if the operation had “uncovered signficant intelligence” – a reference to insurgency leaders – then “we might be having a different conversation”.

The discovery of bodies at the British camp provoked an immediate outcry among the families of the dead Iraqis. They accused British troops of murdering Iraqi civilians and abusing others who were captured.

The soldiers deny the allegations of murder, though some have accused their comrades of abusing Iraqi detainees blindfolded and handcuffed after they were seized.

The inquiry was forced on the MoD in 2009 after high court judges accused it of “serious breaches” of its duty of candour, and failure to respond properly to questions about the soldiers’ conduct after the battle. The judges said the MoD had …read more