| Battle of Danny Boy | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Part of the Iraq War | |||||||
| |||||||
| Belligerents | |||||||
 United Kingdom |  Mahdi Army | ||||||
| Strength | |||||||
| ~100 | |||||||
| Casualties and losses | |||||||
| Some wounded. [1] | 28 confirmed killed. [1] | ||||||
The Battle of Danny Boy took place close to the city of Amarah in Southern Iraq on 14 May 2004, between British soldiers and about 100 Iraqi insurgents of the Mahdi Army. The battle is named after a local British checkpoint called Danny Boy. [2]
The insurgents ambushed a patrol of Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders close to a checkpoint known as Danny Boy near Majar al-Kabir. [1] The Argylls called in reinforcements from the 1st Battalion of the Princess of Wales's Royal Regiment; the latter were also ambushed and due to an electronic communications failure it was some time before further British relief arrived. While waiting for reinforcements the British were involved in one of the fiercest engagements they fought in Iraq. The fighting involved close-quarter rifle fire and bayonets. [3] [2] The battle lasted for about three hours during which 28 Mahdi Army insurgents were killed; the British suffered some wounded, but none were killed in the action. [1]
Sergeant Brian Wood, of the Princess of Wales's Royal Regiment was awarded the Military Cross for his part in the battle. [2]
On 25 November 2009, Bob Ainsworth, then the British Minister of State for the Armed Forces, announced that retired High Court judge Sir Thayne Forbes would chair the Al-Sweady Inquiry. It was alleged that 20 Iraqis, taken prisoner during the battle, were murdered and that others were tortured. The British Ministry of Defence denied that the 20 were captured, stating that 20 bodies were removed from the battlefield for identification and then returned to their families; a further nine were taken prisoner and held for questioning but were not mistreated. [4] [5] In March 2013, Christopher Stanley of the UK-based Rights Watch group said that MoD was trying to get away with grave human rights violations – including killing – without punishment or due process of law.[ citation needed ]
On 4 March 2013 the hearings of the Al-Sweady Public Inquiry opened in London. [6] On 20 March 2014 Public Interest Lawyers, a British law firm acting for the families of the dead Iraqis, announced that they were withdrawing the allegations against British soldiers. [7] They accepted that there was no evidence that the Iraqis had been alive when taken into the British compound. [7]
On 17 December 2014 the inquiry, which cost nearly £25 million, returned its findings. [8] It found that no prisoners had been murdered, nor that their bodies had been mutilated and that the evidence to that effect from the detainees was deliberately untruthful. However, the inquiry did find that British soldiers mistreated nine Iraqi prisoners, but not deliberately. It stated that the ill-treatment was much milder than the initial accusations of torture, mutilation and murder. Sir Thayne said that the "most serious allegations" which "have been hanging over [the British] soldiers for the past 10 years" have been found to be "without foundation". [9] The inquiry found that the allegations made by the Iraqis and their lawyers were based on "deliberate lies, reckless speculation and ingrained hostility". As a result of the inquiry's findings Public Interest Lawyers and Leigh Day, another firm involved in cases against British troops, were referred to the Solicitors Regulatory Authority. In August 2016 Public Interest Lawyers went out of business, while the British government announced it would take steps to prevent further spurious claims against troops. [10] In December 2016 Professor Phil Shiner, head of Public Interest Lawyers, admitted guilt in relation to claims of wrongdoing by British troops in the context of professional misconduct proceedings. He was struck off the roll of solicitors by the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal in February 2017.
The battle and its aftermath are depicted in the 2021 BBC Two drama Danny Boy , starring Anthony Boyle and Toby Jones. [11]
Human rights in post-invasion Iraq have been the subject of concerns and controversies since the 2003 U.S. invasion. Concerns have been expressed about conduct by insurgents, the U.S.-led coalition forces and the Iraqi government. The U.S. is investigating several allegations of violations of international and internal standards of conduct in isolated incidents by its own forces and contractors. The UK is also conducting investigations of alleged human rights abuses by its forces. War crime tribunals and criminal prosecution of the numerous crimes by insurgents are likely years away. In late February 2009, the U.S. State Department released a report on the human rights situation in Iraq, looking back on the prior year (2008).
Abu Ghraib prison was a prison complex in Abu Ghraib, Iraq, located 32 kilometers (20 mi) west of Baghdad. Abu Ghraib prison was opened in the 1950s and served as a maximum-security prison. From the 1970s, the prison was used by Saddam Hussein to hold political prisoners and later the United States to hold Iraqi prisoners. It developed a reputation for torture and extrajudicial killing, and was closed in 2014.
About six months after the United States invasion of Iraq of 2003, rumors of Iraq prison abuse scandals started to emerge.
Kenneth John Bigley was a British civil engineer who was kidnapped by Islamic extremists in the al-Mansour district of Baghdad, Iraq, on 16 September 2004, along with his colleagues, U.S. citizens Jack Hensley and Eugene Armstrong. Following the murders of Hensley and Armstrong by beheading over the course of three days, Bigley was killed in the same manner two weeks later, despite the attempted intervention of the Muslim Council of Britain and the indirect intervention of the British government. Videos of the killings were posted on websites and blogs.
Events in the year 2005 in Iraq.
The Iraq War was a protracted armed conflict in Iraq from 2003 to 2011. It began with the invasion of Iraq by the United States-led coalition that overthrew the Ba'athist government of Saddam Hussein. The conflict continued for much of the next decade as an insurgency emerged to oppose the coalition forces and the post-invasion Iraqi government. US troops were officially withdrawn in 2011. The United States became re-involved in 2014 at the head of a new coalition, and the insurgency and many dimensions of the armed conflict are ongoing. The invasion occurred as part of the George W. Bush administration's war on terror following the September 11 attacks.
Baha Mousa was an Iraqi man who died while in British Army custody in Basra, Iraq in September 2003. The inquiry into his death found that Mousa's death was caused by "factors including lack of food and water, heat, exhaustion, fear, previous injuries and the hooding and stress positions used by British troops - and a final struggle with his guards". The inquiry heard that Mousa was hooded for almost 24 hours during his 36 hours of custody by the 1st Battalion of the Queen's Lancashire Regiment and that he suffered at least 93 injuries before his death. The report later details that Mousa was subject to several practices banned under both domestic law and the Geneva Conventions. Seven British soldiers were charged in connection with the case. Six were found not guilty. Corporal Donald Payne pleaded guilty to inhumane treatment of a prisoner and was jailed for a year and dismissed from the Army. On 19 September 2006 with his guilty plea to inhumane treatment of Mousa, Payne became the first British soldier to admit to a war crime.
United States war crimes are violations of the law of war which were committed by members of the United States Armed Forces after the signing of the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 and the signing of the Geneva Conventions. The United States prosecutes offenders through the War Crimes Act of 1996 as well as through articles in the Uniform Code of Military Justice. The United States signed the 1999 Rome Statute but it never ratified the treaty, taking the position that the International Criminal Court (ICC) lacks fundamental checks and balances. The American Service-Members' Protection Act of 2002 further limited US involvement with the ICC. The ICC was conceived as a body to try war crimes when states do not have effective or reliable processes to investigate for themselves. The United States says that it has investigated many of the accusations alleged by the ICC prosecutors as having occurred in Afghanistan, and thus does not accept ICC jurisdiction over its nationals.
Harith Mohey Al Deen Abd al-Obeidi was an Iraqi politician and cleric and member of Parliament for the Iraqi Accord Front. He was assassinated on 12 June 2009.
Martyn Day is a British solicitor specializing in international, environmental and product liability claims who founded – and is the Senior Partner of – the law firm Leigh Day. He was a director of Greenpeace Environmental Trust, having stepped down as chairman of Greenpeace UK in 2008.
On July 12, 2007, a series of air-to-ground attacks were conducted by a team of two U.S. AH-64 Apache helicopters in Al-Amin al-Thaniyah, New Baghdad, during the Iraqi insurgency which followed the invasion of Iraq. On April 5, 2010, the attacks received worldwide coverage and controversy following the release of 39 minutes of classified gunsight footage by WikiLeaks. The video, which WikiLeaks titled Collateral Murder, showed the crew firing on a group of people and killing several of them, including two Reuters journalists, and then laughing at some of the casualties, all of whom were civilians. An anonymous U.S. military official confirmed the authenticity of the footage, which provoked global discussion on the legality and morality of the attacks.
The Iraq War documents leak is the disclosure to WikiLeaks of 391,832 United States Army field reports, also called the Iraq War Logs, of the Iraq War from 2004 to 2009 and published on the Internet on 22 October 2010. The files record 66,081 civilian deaths out of 109,000 recorded deaths. The leak resulted in the Iraq Body Count (IBC) project adding 15,000 civilian deaths to their count, bringing their total to over 150,000, with roughly 80% of those civilians. It is the biggest leak in the military history of the United States, surpassing the Afghan War documents leak of 25 July 2010.
The Iraq Historic Allegations Team (IHAT) is a unit set up by the British government in March 2010 to investigate allegations of abuse and torture by British soldiers in Iraq. Much of these have focused on three interrogation sites near Basra operated by the Joint Forward Interrogation Team (JFIT) between March 2003 and December 2008. The inquiry was established in November 2010 after 146 Iraqi men said they had been tortured.
The Al-Sweady Inquiry was a five-year public inquiry led by Thayne Forbes which investigated accusations of mistreatment of prisoners by the British Army following the Battle of Danny Boy. The enquiry commenced its investigations in 2009.
Sir John Thayne Forbes is a British retired judge and barrister. As a High Court judge, he presided over the trial of Harold Shipman who was convicted of 15 murders in 2000 and subsequently sentenced to life imprisonment. Shipman is now recognised as one of the most prolific serial killers in history. He led the Al-Sweady Inquiry, a five-year public enquiry that reported in 2014.
Philip Joseph Shiner is a British former human rights solicitor. He was struck off the roll of solicitors in England and Wales in 2017 over misconduct relating to false abuse claims against British troops. He was Head of Strategic Litigation at Public Interest Lawyers (International) from 2014 until the firm's closure on 31 August 2016. He had previously been Principal at Public Interest Lawyers Ltd from 1999 to 2014.
The Battle of Majar al-Kabir was the result of growing distrust between the British military and local inhabitants of south-eastern of Iraq over house searches and confiscation of personal weapons that locals felt were crucial for their self-protection. Despite a signed agreement between local people and British forces stating that the British would not enter the town, the 1st Battalion, Parachute Regiment started patrolling in the town of Majar al-Kabir on 24 June 2003 the day after the agreement was signed. The British thought the agreement was to stop the weapons searches that involved going into the houses of local inhabitants.
Colour Sergeant Brian Wood is a former soldier in the Princess of Wales's Royal Regiment who was awarded the Military Cross for gallantry in the Battle of Danny Boy.
Danny Boy is a biographical drama film directed by Sam Miller. It details parts of the life of war veteran Brian Wood.
