AMERICAN military officials are investigating allegations that US soldiers have sexually assaulted US servicewomen in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The US military in Baghdad confirmed that about forty women in the Army had alleged they were attacked in the past year. Allegations have also been made involving incidents in Afghanistan and Kuwait.

In Washington this week members of Congress expressed shock that more than 100 women on active duty had reported attempted rapes, rapes and other assaults.

The Pentagon sought to deflect criticism with the publication of a report which showed that the proportion of servicewomen reporting violations had fallen to 3 per cent in 2002 from 6 per cent in 1995. However, the study’s margin of error was two percentage points, suggesting that the level of attacks might barely have dropped since 1995.

Saxby Chambliss, a Republican Senator from Georgia, said the number of assaults was “shocking”. Susan Collins, a Republican from Maine, said US servicewomen sometimes had “more to fear from fellow soldiers than the enemy”.

Victims’ advocates fear that the reported cases could be the tip of the iceberg. Women in a combat zone may be reluctant to report assaults for fear of irritating the military hierarchy.

Les Brownlee, the acting Army Secretary, conceded under questioning from a Senate Armed Services Committee panel that many cases went unreported. He said a taskforce would address the problem.

The troubling statistics come at a time when women are playing a more prominent role in the US military, including in Iraq. Most women soldiers serve at vast logistics centres far from the heat of battle where soldiers spend many weeks at a time, awaiting orders to go into action.

About 6,400 of the 214,000 women on active duty were assaulted, the 2002 study revealed. It noted that 14,000 men reported that someone on the military’s payroll had tried to force them to have sex or actually raped them, a smaller proportion of the 1.4 million men on active duty.

The problem is not restricted to soldiers in combat. An official report on an elite naval academy in Colorado last year said that rape of female cadets by their male counterparts had long been ignored by Pentagon officials. Sexual assaults “became a part of life” at the school because of a “chasm of leadership” on campus and in the Pentagon, it said.

On Wednesday senators from both parties who questioned David Chu, an Under-Secretary of Defence, George Casey, the Army’s Vice-Chief of Staff, and other Service chiefs demanded better treatment of their countrywomen.

Ben Nelson, a Nebraska Democrat, said that he detected no sense of “outrage” among the military leadership about the sex attacks.

Times Recommends

• Please help: maimed children of war want their lives back
• Cabal seizes diamond riches to buy power
• White House gatecrashers got to the president