BRITISH troops serving in southern Iraq just after the combat phase was declared over in May 2003 found themselves confronted by wholesale looting, and no guidance from London on how to deal with it.

So the soldiers developed a method of punishing looters. They gave them a “wetting”: ordering them into dykes or ditches filled with dirty water, hoping that the soaking would deter them in the future.

The looting was so widespread that the commanding officer of 3 Commando Brigade Royal Marines even requested permission to shoot looters. But he was told by the Army’s senior lawyer in Basra that this was unacceptable and that only minimum force could be used.

This was the violent and bewildering background to the incident on May 8, 2003, when four Guardsmen, members of the elite Household Division, struggled to cope with looting in their patrol area. It was their last day in Iraq. The next morning they were due to fly to Kuwait and then home.

Four suspected looters, one of them 15-year-old Ahmed Jabar Karheem, were forced at gunpoint into the Shatt al- Basra canal, with fatal consequences for the teenager who had never learnt to swim.

When Britain’s campaign in Iraq, Operation Telic, began, the Royal Military Police gave an undertaking that it would investigate every incident involving the shooting of an Iraqi and any incident of alleged abuse where a British soldier acted or reacted outside his rules of engagement.

However, there were so many incidents, especially during the turmoil after the end of the war on May 1, 2003, that the Red Caps’ special investigations branch could not cope with the workload. They were also having to investigate incidents without any clear framework on which to build their cases. Action taken by British soldiers against looters was one of the confusing areas.

The most devastating evidence during the court martial of the three Irish Guardsmen and one Coldstream Guardsman was given by Lieutenant-Colonel Nicholas Mercer, who was the most senior legal officer at the headquarters of 1st UK Armoured Division, which led the British invasion campaign. He told the hearing in Colchester that Britain had failed to make any strategic plan for the occupation of Iraq. Nothing was planned, he said, because the Government was convinced that the United Nations would take responsibility for the occupation.

Colonel Mercer told the court: “It was not foreseen that the state (Iraq) would implode to the extent that it did. What ensued was unique in modern postwar conflict.”

When he was approached by the 3 Commando Brigade brigadier about the legal backing for shooting looters, Colonel Mercer said that there were no lawful grounds for such action. “I made it absolutely clear that non-lethal minimum force was to be used. I did not want dead looters on the streets,” he said.

Colonel Mercer later issued guidelines for all commanding officers on how to deal with looters. But he admitted that there were insufficient numbers of troops to carry out the responsibilities of an occupying power “in a belligerent occupation”.

In Basra alone, with a population of half a million, rising to about a million, there were only 64 Royal Military Police personnel and they had other duties to perform as well as dealing with criminals. So soldiers resorted to “wetting” looters as an ad hoc way of handing out summary punishment.

Lieutenant Daniel O’Connell, of the Irish Guards, who was awarded the Military Cross for bravery in Iraq, told the court: “There was certainly a practice of making looters wet to deter them from looting.” He said that this must have been known higher up the chain of command.

Major Peter MacMullen, the commanding officer of No 1 Company Irish Guards, said that his men regularly rescued looters from lynch mobs in Basra. Asked whether it was fair or humane for looters to be forced into canals, he replied: “I don’t think it was a bad idea. Other companies were doing it to looters. We had shot our bolt with looters. All we could do was detain them and tell them off. We would tell them not to do it again with a robust bout of shouting. They expected us to shoot them.”

In the vast majority of cases looters were simply released and told to go home.

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