American military officers have said that they could be sent to the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba as suspected terrorists, rather than be given official status as prisoners of war.

More than 8,300 Iraqis are being held as PoWs by the Americans and British, a small proportion of whom are classed as paramilitaries, including members of the Fedayin, the 20,000-strong militia loyal to President Saddam Hussein recruited mainly from the criminal elements.

The British now refer to the Fedayin as paramilitaries, or irregulars, but American generals have branded as terrorists those Iraqis who wear civilian uniforms to fire on troops, especially since the suicide car-bomb attack on US Marines. Their choice of the word “terrorist” echoes the “unlawful combatant” status given to the 660 suspected al-Qaeda and Taleban prisoners from Afghanistan who are being held without charge or trial in Guantanamo Bay.

Air Marshal Brian Burridge, British Forces commander in Qatar, made clear yesterday that he wanted prisoners and their alleged crimes to be handled in full accordance with international law. He said: “I do have a passionate, personal belief that the only way to deal with asymmetric warfare and this sort of irregular behaviour is to use the war crimes process . . . I think that is an important and powerful way of dealing with it. That is my personal view, but it is not me who makes the decisions.”

American military officers at the US Marine combat headquarters in Iraq said that captured paramilitaries were being separated from the other PoWs and had not been given official status under the Geneva Convention. Officers told The Washington Post that special hearings would be held in Iraq under Article 5 of the Convention to decide whether they were legitimate PoWs or illegal combatants. If defined as the latter, they could be sent to Guantanamo Bay.

A spokesman for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said that anyone captured in a war zone, whether in military uniform or civilian clothes, had to be treated as a PoW under the Geneva Convention. He said that paramilitaries had the same rights under the Convention and should be identified as PoWs so that they could be formally registered and interviewed by the ICRC. Yesterday the ICRC said that it had started to visit Iraqi prisoners of war held at a camp near the southern town of Umm Qasr.

The Ministry of Defence in London supported the ICRC position and said there was no case for treating paramilitaries in a different way. A spokeswoman said that the 4,314 Iraqi PoWs taken by the British military in southern Iraq were being kept at a holding centre and were a British responsibility. But eventually all the PoWs would be guarded by American military police.

The MoD official said that the Geneva Convention covered anyone carrying arms, whether they were members of the recognised Iraqi forces or not. Even “inhabitants” who took up arms “spontaneously” against what they considered to be the enemy were also entitled to be classed as PoWs, the MoD said. A British spokesman in Qatar said: “We treat them all the same.”

Speaking at US Central Command in Qatar, Brigadier-General Vincent Brookes said that no decision had been made to designate any of the Iraqi prisoners as unlawful combatants. “Right now at this point, we are treating all that we have taken into our custody as prisoners of war,” he said, noting that the Bush Administration would decide whether to treat the paramilitaries as terrorists.

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