Is bombing innocent citizens to kill terrorists wrong?

The question that must come to every decent person’s mind is; “What is the right thing to do when you can’t capture or kill a terrorist from the ground and the alternative is dropping a bomb or firing a rocket from the air onto his home which will result in the deaths of innocent women and children who will become collateral damage?”

I suppose that in order to answer that question, one must look at it from the point of view of either a bystander or a victim of the actions of the terrorist.

Here is an example of that occurring recently. Israel attacked the Palestinian city of Gaza beginning in the last week of December 2008. I don’t take issue with the motives of the Israelis for commencing such an attack considering that Palestinians under the leadership of the Hamas where firing rockets indiscriminately into southern Israel weeks prior to the Israeli attack.

The Israelis learned that Nizar Rayan, a powerful and (according to the Israelis, a dangerous terrorist leader) lived in the Jabaliya refugee camp located in the northern part of the city of Gaza. This particular camp, one of eight, is also the largest Palestinian refugee camp established after 1948. More than 100,000 Palestinian refugees live in the camp. The densely populated built-up camp is only 1.4 kilometres square. It is characterized by narrow alleys and pathways, and concrete and cinderblock shelters. Now obviously, such camps are populated by many thousands upon thousands of innocent men, women and children who are not terrorists.

The Israelis wanted to kill this man but to do that, they would have to either slip into the camp and go to his home and kill him, or alternatively, kill him from the air.

Let me state from the get go; slipping into the camp would be relatively easy but killing him without being later spotted by Palestinian soldiers or police, would be near impossible considering his large family was in the house and if they survived the shootings, they would sound the alarm. It would be a suicide mission for the attackers.

Rayan was one of the architects behind the 2007 Battle of Gaza, in which 400 peaceful Palestinian Fatah party members were killed and dozens more Palestinians were tortured and maimed. Rayan was fundamentally opposed to the state of Israel. He proclaimed that, "True Islam would ever allow a Jewish state to survive in the Muslim Middle East. To him, the existence of Israel was an impossibility. He went as far as to declare that Israel was an offense against God. Rayan also publically stated that Jews are a ‘cursed people and that some were transformed into pigs and apes by Allah.’ Rayan mentored suicide bombers. He sent his own son on a suicide mission which killed two Israelis at the former Israeli settlement of Elei Sinai in the Gaza Strip. To the Israelis, it was important that this terrorist leader be killed and the deed was to be done as soon as possible.

According to the Israeli government, Rayan's house served as an arms and ammunition warehouse and also as a Hamas communications center. Further, they believed that his home was the location of the Hamas command centre.

Based on the info that the Israelis learned and the need to get rid of this man and destroy his home where the so-called ammunition was stored and it being a command centre, one can appreciate why the Israelis decided that bombing his home was the only means available to them.

Rayan was killed in an Israeli Air Force strike on January 1st, 2009 during the 2008–2009 Israel-Gaza conflict. A one-ton bomb was dropped on his home killing him, his four wives, and 11 of their children. His headless body was later found on the street.

He had been warned of the impending bombing and advised to get his family out of the house but he choose to ignore the warning and he and his family remained in the home and as a result, they all died in the explosions of the bomb and the ammunition in the house. Nearby houses were also destroyed. I don’t know how many innocent civilians died in those houses.

No matter how you look at this scenario, his four wives and eleven children had sadly become collateral damage. I don’t blame the Israelis for this. If anything, I blame Rayan. He sacrificed his wives and children and made them martyrs for the Hamas cause. But even if no warning was given and the Israelis bombed the house knowing that Rayan’s family was inside, I still wouldn’t have blamed the Israelis.

They had no other choice but to bomb the house. The need to kill Rayan took precedence over the killing of his innocent family members.

I realize that that kind of statement is cruel and mean but considering how important it was to get rid of Rayan, I don’t see how anyone can come to any other conclusion.

Collateral damage is damage that is unintended or incidental to the intended outcome. The term originated in the U.S. military, but it has since expanded into broader use. Such damage is not unlawful so long as it is not excessive in light of the overall military advantage anticipated from the attack. Obviously, bombing an entire refugee camp to kill one man who is thought to be somewhere in the camp would be overkill and no amount of explanation trying to justify such an act would be satisfactory.

Civilian casualties is a military term describing civilian or non-combatant persons killed, injured, or imprisoned by military action. The description of civilian casualties includes any form of military action regardless of whether civilians were targeted directly. This differs from the description of collateral damage that only applies to unintentional effects of military action including unintended casualties.

For example, during World War Two, hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians died from aerial bombings even though it was not the intentions of those in the bombers to kill innocent women and children when their assigned targets were railroad lines, fuel storage tanks and arms factories.

Unfortunately, as the war progressed, the Allies went far over the line when they deliberately bombed cities knowing that thousands of innocent victims would die as a result. For example, they bombed the homes in Berlin many times in hopes that the deaths of thousands of innocent civilians would bring about the end of the war. It didn’t. It just made the Germans angry and prompted them to fight harder.

On August 2, 2007 at 4:00 in the afternoon, in the Taliban-controlled village of Qaleh (Qal'eh) Chah in the district of Baghran in Helmand Province, US/NATO forces bombed the village as part of an alleged decapitation strike. They were targeting two Taliban commanders. A group of people had gathered near the popular shrine of Ibrahim Shah Baba (though the reason for the gathering remains unclear). The bombs that struck them were 2,000-pound bombs.

At least 20 civilians (including an 8-yr-old boy) with shrapnel wounds were brought to the main Bost hospital in Lashkar Gah, the provincial capital. One of the injured men died there. In the Lashkar Gah hospital, Shokhi Khan, a relative of one of the wounded, said several hundred civilians were killed or wounded in the strikes. He said people had gathered for picnics and to go to a shrine in Baghran district north of Lashkar Gah when the raids started. Twelve wounded men were brought to a hospital in the main southern city of Kandahar, said Sharifullah Khan, a doctor there. Nasibullah, one of the wounded men in Kandahar hospital, said the bombs hit a market. He claimed there were no Taliban there at the time of the attack. Other injured persons were brought to hospitals in Sangin and Musa Qala districts.

The Afghan Defense Ministry said some 40 men had also been brought to hospital in the main southern city of Kandahar. " Lieutenant-Colonel Charlie Mayo, suggested the wounded adult males may have been Taliban fighters. He said, "We are very confident we hit a large meeting of Taliban and they are very sore about it." The trouble was that there was no real proof that the market place was really used as a meeting place for the Taliban at the time of the aerial strike. One thing one can be sure of is that at the time of the day, a great many women and children would be in the market place.

In my opinion, this was overkill. Both the Americans and British have highly trained and efficient teams that can go into an area and capture or eliminate terrorists during a ground attack. This is what they should have done intead of bombing an entire market place in the hopes that they would kill some Taliban leaders.

In 14 June 14th, 2008 a small group of a dozen paratroopers and a Pashtun interpreter, embarked on the mission after learning that a "high value target", believed to be responsible for dozens of roadside bombs, was hiding in a village they had visited earlier in the day.The villagers they had met only hours before had disappeared or were in hiding. The quiet was what the Army call a "combat indicator" in that the "absence of the normal suggests the presence of the abnormal".

The tension increased as they arrived at the village pond where earlier an engineer had laid 11lb of plastic explosive and a large bar mine to collapse a tunnel where American lithium batteries had been found. Human excrement had been smothered at the entrance, apparently to deter the curious, and inside someone had opened up the plastic packs containing a dozen batteries that are used in roadside bombs or pressure-plate booby-traps. Intelligence indicated that one of the villagers questioned near the tunnel in the morning was an "IED (improvised explosive device) facilitator" and commanders wanted him urgently detained.

Outside the mosque where he was last spotted, the Paras took up all-round firing positions as the interpreter and three other soldiers entered the building's compound. There were at least 16 men in the mosque, a number of them of fighting age.

The suspected bomber was lured out of the mosque by a ruse. Outside he stroked his beard with worry as he spotted more armed Paras.It was then confirmed that the man was the wanted suspect.

The Paras began moving out of the village in bounds, soldiers covering each other as they withdrew with the suspected bomb-maker, only stopping when they reached the safety of high ground away from the immediate threat of small arms fire.

The bomb-maker was searched and formally detained by the accompanying military policeman. After being positively identified and handcuffed, with black-out goggles over his eyes, he was flown away by helicopter for questioning, the Paras set off in Viking armoured vehicles and left the village intact.There was no collateral damage whatsoever left behind as a result of that attack.

I realize that there are times when attacks from the air are the only way to kill terrorists but if it is at all feasible, this should be done by a team of especially trained armed men who can slip in and out of a village with very little collateral damage left behind them.

We are at an era where a soldier on the midnight shift can sit at a console six or more thousand miles away and control an unmanned plane carrying a large bomb and as soon as he sees the intended target, drop the radio-guided bomb on him. If the target is walking in a busy market place in which hundreds of innocent civilians are shopping, and the bomb strikes him, hundreds of innocent victims will also die in the process.

In the safety of the control room thousands of miles away, the soldier and his superiors will chalk the strike up as a success and later they will drive home to their families in time for their breakfasts with them. The hundreds of innocent victims (what’s left of them) will be buried within hours.

The American armed forces have the ability to do this and they are saying that such an action is the way of the future. I shudder to think that kind of warfare is what is in store for innocent civilians who want no part of wars or terrorism.

When considering that kind of warfare, compare the soldiers of years gone by who fought hand to hand, to snipers who are never at risk from their targets. Which soldiers are the more courageous?

Personally, I don’t care how soldiers fight. What I do care about is how and why innocent civilians die as collateral damage.