Published by sputniknews.com
The latest atrocities by US-trained Iraqi Army forces in Mosul are the outcome of Washington policies that have caused millions of civilian deaths since the invasion of Iraq 14 years and there will be more to come, global peace activist Dr. Helen Caldicott told Sputnik.
WASHINGTON (Sputnik) – Iraqi army division trained by the United States government allegedly executed several dozen prisoners in Mosul’s Old City, Human Rights Watch (HRW) announced last week.
“US training policies made no distinction to spare civilians in war situations that themselves had been caused by the toppling of previously peaceful and stable governments,” Caldicott said.
Such outrages were the result of ruthless US strategic and training policies that taught soldiers to be callous about inflicting civilian casualties, Caldicott, founder of Physicians for Social Responsibility, the organization that was the co-winner of the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize told Sputnik on Thursday.
That incident was just the latest documented atrocity in a dark record of massive human rights abuses that had continued in the region for decades, Caldicott stated.
US policies have been characterized by “dreadful killing, organized mayhem and unending wars,” she said.
The death toll from those policies already amounted to several million in the 21st century including more one million fatalities in Iraq alone, Caldicott calculated.
“The absolute ungovernable mess in the Middle East includes Iraq where over one million people have died including half a million children,” she said.
Similar policies had repeatedly let to comparable disastrous outcomes in many other previously stable countries across the region, Caldicott observed.
“In Yemen, millions have been displaced and face starvation as the world stands passively by. In Libya where [then secretary of state] Hilary Clinton played a major role killing [long-time ruler Muammar] Gaddafi converted the whole country into one of gruesome tribal warfare,” she said.
The more than 600,000 people who had been killed over the past six and a half years of civil war in Syria had also died as a direct consequence of US policies, Caldicott explained.
US intervention had also tuned oil-wealthy Libya and Iraq, the two countries with the highest levels of education and health care across the entire region, into poverty stricken chaos and anarchy, Caldicott remarked.
US policies of indiscriminately killing civilians claimed to be justified in the name of hunting down terrorists had in reality radicalized entire populations of previously peaceful people, Caldicott stated.
“Impersonalised drone killing, families finding body parts of their relatives, and brutalised grief inevitably have led to so-called terrorism where young men ravaged with grief and vengeance attack the very countries which orchestrated their doom,” she said.
Caldicott is the author of many books, including “The New Nuclear Danger: George W. Bush’s Military Industrial Complex” and “War in Heaven:” The Arms Race in Outer Space.” The Smithsonian Institution has named her one of the most influential women of the 20th century.
