This month has seen the United Nations issue two reports alleging the commission of war crimes and crimes against humanity by the United States in two theatres of engagement.  In one, the UN Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on the Islamic Republic of Iran concluded that the US had committed war crimes in two attacks on Iran on the first day of the war killing civilians, including over 120 children.  The other, featuring exploits in the Caribbean Sea entitled Operation Southern Spear, involved the extravagantly murderous campaign waged by the Trump administration against alleged drug traffickers using small vessels. 

These narco-strikes (a reported number of 68, resulting in the deaths of 223 people), provoked the Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and Counter Terrorism, Ben Saul, to find “reasonable grounds” that they constituted “crimes against humanity of murder under customary international law”.  The killings were “unlawful and intentional under international law.”

These narco-strikes (a reported number of 68, resulting in the deaths of 223 people), provoked the Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and Counter Terrorism, Ben Saul, to find “reasonable grounds” that they constituted “crimes against humanity of murder under customary international law”.  The killings were “unlawful and intentional under international law.”

On February 28, in the opening phase of its pre-emptive, illegal war against Tehran, the US armed forces bombed the Shajareh Tayyebeh elementary girls’ school in Minab, Hormozgan Province.  Over 160 people died, among them 123 children under 13-years of age.  The school, which had been labelled by the Defense Intelligence Agency a legitimate military target, was struck by three missiles.  (This had been casually euphemised as a targeting error based on obsolete intelligence: the site of the school had originally been part of an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) naval base but was separated from that facility between 2013 and 2016 and converted into a civilian educational site.)  That same day, an athletic facility in Lamerd city, Fars Province, where girls were undergoing sports training, was struck by a Precision Strike Missile, resulting in the deaths of 22 civilians, including two schoolgirls, two schoolboys and........

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