U.S. fears soldiers executed

Blair also suspects Iraq killed two British POWs


NBC, MSNBC AND NEWS SERVICES

WASHINGTON, March 27 — Iraq has executed prisoners of war, the Pentagon’s No. 2 general said Wednesday night as he listed what he called unprecedented Iraqi violations of the laws of war. Marine Gen. Peter Pace, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, apparently was referring to some of the U.S. Army troops captured Sunday by Iraqi forces in the city of An Nasiriyah. Iraqi state television later showed video footage of five POWs who were alive and the bodies of at least five U.S. soldiers

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Unwilling Iraqis tell of being shot by own officers


By Dexter Filkins
The New York Times

DIWANIYA, Iraq -- The aftermath of the firefight was a tableau of twisted Iraqi corpses, tins of unopened food and the dirty mattresses where they had spent their final hours.

But the Iraqi private with a bullet wound in the back of his head suggested something unusually grim. Up and down the 200-mile stretch of desert where the American and British forces have advanced, one Iraqi prisoner after another has told a similar tale: that many Iraqi soldiers were fighting at gunpoint, threatened with death by hard-core loyalists of President Saddam Hussein.

It was a small-caliber bullet, most likely from a pistol, fired at close range. Iraqi prisoners taken after the battle said their officers had been firing at them, pushing them into battle.

"The officers threatened to shoot us unless we fought," said a wounded Iraqi from his bed in the American field hospital here. "They took out their guns and pointed them and told us to fight."

"We think he was shot by his own," said Dr. Wade Wilde, a Marine surgeon. "If he had been hit by an M-16, it would have taken his whole head off. It seems like it was an Iraqi gun."

As Wilde spoke, his eyes drifted to the Iraqi soldier, still clinging to life, on the stretcher.

"We've tried to make him as comfortable as possible," Wilde said, "and let the wound run its course."