Environmental warfare means waging warfare by means of deliberate environmental destruction or alteration, in order to repel enemy assault, as well as to hinder or injure the opponent or hamper the military supply-chain.
Criminal law deals with Environmental warfare, also referred to as ″environcide″, as a Crime against humanity and/or a Crime against nature. [1]
Operations, which fall under environmental welfare can include hydrogeological, physical, and/ or chemical processes or substances. The goal of environmental warfare is not to kill the enemies but to generate a partial health damage for their societies or to distract the enemy in order to prevent or hinder attacks. [2]
The following motivations to engage in environmental destruction can differ and have been sicientifically differentiated into six motivations. Feuer categorized the reasons and incentives as being: ideological, cultural, political, technological, strategical or tactical. [3]
The Kuwaiti oil fires were caused by the Iraqi military setting fire to a reported 605 to 732 oil wells along with an unspecified number of oil filled low-lying areas, such as oil lakes and fire trenches while retreating from Kuwait in 1991 due to the advances of US-led coalition forces in the Gulf War. The fires were started in January and February 1991, and the first oil well fires were extinguished in early April 1991, with the last well capped on November 6, 1991.
Sabotage is a deliberate action aimed at weakening a polity, government, effort, or organization through subversion, obstruction, demoralization, destabilization, division, disruption, or destruction. One who engages in sabotage is a saboteur. Saboteurs typically try to conceal their identities because of the consequences of their actions and to avoid invoking legal and organizational requirements for addressing sabotage.
Asymmetric warfare is a type of war between belligerents whose relative military power, strategy or tactics differ significantly. This type of warfare often, but not necessarily, involves insurgents, terrorist groups, or resistance militias operating within territory mostly controlled by the superior force.
A war crime is a violation of the laws of war that gives rise to individual criminal responsibility for actions by combatants in action, such as intentionally killing civilians or intentionally killing prisoners of war, torture, taking hostages, unnecessarily destroying civilian property, deception by perfidy, wartime sexual violence, pillaging, and for any individual that is part of the command structure who orders any attempt to committing mass killings including genocide or ethnic cleansing, the granting of no quarter despite surrender, the conscription of children in the military and flouting the legal distinctions of proportionality and military necessity.
Ethnic cleansing is the systematic forced removal of ethnic, racial, or religious groups from a given area, with the intent of making the society ethnically homogeneous. Along with direct removal such as deportation or population transfer, it also includes indirect methods aimed at forced migration by coercing the victim group to flee and preventing its return, such as murder, rape, and property destruction. Both the definition and charge of ethnic cleansing is often disputed, with some researchers including and others excluding coercive assimilation or mass killings as a means of depopulating an area of a particular group.
Military strategy is a set of ideas implemented by military organizations to pursue desired strategic goals. Derived from the Greek word strategos, the term strategy, when first used during the 18th century, was seen in its narrow sense as the "art of the general", or "the art of arrangement" of troops. and deals with the planning and conduct of campaigns, the movement and disposition of forces, and the deception of the enemy.
Green anarchism, also known as ecological anarchism or eco-anarchism, is an anarchist school of thought that focuses on ecology and environmental issues. It is an anti-capitalist and anti-authoritarian form of radical environmentalism, which emphasises social organization, freedom and self-fulfillment.
The law of war is a component of international law that regulates the conditions for initiating war and the conduct of hostilities. Laws of war define sovereignty and nationhood, states and territories, occupation, and other critical terms of law.
A scorched-earth policy is a military strategy of destroying everything that allows an enemy military force to be able to fight a war, including the deprivation and destruction of water, food, humans, animals, plants and any kind of tools and infrastructure. Its use is possible by a retreating army to leave nothing of value worth taking, to weaken the attacking force or by an advancing army to fight against unconventional warfare.
The Lieber Code was the military law that governed the wartime conduct of the Union Army by defining and describing command responsibility for war crimes and crimes against humanity; and the military responsibilities of the Union soldier fighting in the American Civil War against the Confederate States of America.
Principles of war are rules and guidelines that represent truths in the practice of war and military operations.
Herbicidal warfare is the use of substances primarily designed to destroy the plant-based ecosystem of an area. Although herbicidal warfare use chemical substances, its main purpose is to disrupt agricultural food production and/or to destroy plants which provide cover or concealment to the enemy, not to asphyxiate or poison humans and/or destroy human-made structures. Herbicidal warfare has been forbidden by the Environmental Modification Convention since 1978, which bans "any technique for changing the composition or structure of the Earth's biota".
Economic warfare or economic war is an economic strategy used by belligerent states with the goal of weakening the economy of other states. This is primarily achieved by the use of economic blockades. Ravaging the crops of the enemy is a classic method, used for thousands of years.
War can heavily damage the environment, and warring countries often place operational requirements ahead of environmental concerns for the duration of the war. Some international law is designed to limit this environmental harm.
Adolf Hitler's directives, or Führer directives (Führerbefehle), were instructions and strategic plans issued by Adolf Hitler himself over the course of World War II. The directives covered a wide range of subjects, from detailed direction of the Armed Forces' operations during World War II, to the governance of occupied territories and their populations. In addition to being a reflection of his personality and strategic interests, they were also a reflection of the larger philosophy of the Nazi regime.
Ecocide is the destruction of the environment by humans. Ecocide threatens all human populations who are dependent on natural resources for maintaining ecosystems and ensuring their ability to support future generations. The Independent Expert Panel for the Legal Definition of Ecocide describes it as "unlawful or wanton acts committed with knowledge that there is a substantial likelihood of severe and either widespread or long-term damage to the environment being caused by those acts".
Greek–Iraqi relations are foreign relations between Greece and Iraq. Relations of the Greek and Iraqi peoples are deeply rooted in history, both have developed cultures that have influenced the course of humanity. They date as far back as when early Greek scholars of the 1st millennium BC lived and studied in Babylonia and Assyria, to later when Alexander III of Macedon ruled Mesopotamia and would die in Babylon, Iraq. Greece helped invade Iraq during the Gulf War. In the Iraq War, however, Greece refused to send troops to participate in the American destruction of the Iraqi government, with Greeks overwhelmingly opposed to the invasion. Greece traditionally maintained good and friendly relations with Iraq due to strong historical and cultural bonds, dating back to ancient times.
Study of the environmental impact of war focuses on the modernization of warfare and its increasing effects on the environment. Scorched earth methods have been used for much of recorded history. However, the methods of modern warfare cause far greater devastation on the environment. The progression of warfare from chemical weapons to nuclear weapons has increasingly created stress on ecosystems and the environment. The military sector is responsible for around 5.5% of global GHG emissions, which are not included in GHG assesments on global and country level. Specific examples of the environmental impact of war include World War I, World War II, the Vietnam War, the Rwandan Civil War, the Kosovo War, the Gulf War, and the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The First Gulf War (1990) and the 2003 Iraq War, also known as the Second Gulf War, brought about significant environmental degradation with several facets still negatively impacting the area today. As a frame of reference, the Persian Gulf countries consist of the following states: the UAE, Bahrain, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Kuwait, with the latter two facing the most environmental damage following the two wars due to their central position in the conflict.
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