Did the US carry out war crimes in Iran?

Celia Hatten (0:00)

This is The Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service.

I'm Celia Hatten, and in the early hours of Friday, the 18th of September, these are our main stories. Washington has rejected a UN report alleging the US military may have committed war crimes in the early days of the war on Iran. NATO Secretary General tells us why he thinks Russia's Vladimir Putin is becoming increasingly desperate over Ukraine. And new research explains why caffeine affects some people more than others. Also in this podcast…

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Celia Hatten (0:44)

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We'll begin with a new report from the United Nations that's getting a lot of attention. Investigators with the UN Human Rights Council say there are reasonable grounds to believe that the United States carried out war crimes in the early days of its war on Iran. A fact-finding mission looked at two deadly missile strikes in February that killed more than 170 people, one on a primary school in the southern town of Manab. Another airstrike hit a sports complex in the town of Lemaire, also in the south. The Iranian authorities were also mentioned by UN investigators. Tehran's accused of committing crimes against humanity during its violent repression of anti-government protests that started last December.

Iran has previously denied wrongdoing, though it's yet to say anything about this latest report. As we'll hear in a moment, the US has responded. Tom Bateman is our State Department correspondent in Washington. He told me more about the findings, starting with that strike on the primary school in Manab.

Tom Bateman (1:59)

What this UN fact-finding mission says is that it believes like much of the reporting in the US has backed as well, that there was a targeting database error. Basically, the Americans were using out-of-date information, it suggests, about the school building itself, in effect, believing that it was still a part of a military compound, which it wasn't and hadn't been for many years. So the report says this amounted to more than mere negligence, going on to say that the US acted recklessly. And this gave the fact-finding mission reasonable grounds to believe the US committed a war crime under international law.

So, that's as related to Minab. It then goes on to talk about the strike on a sports center in Limerde in Iran, the same day which killed 22 civilians. Also describing this as indiscriminate and therefore saying that they believe that, too, constituted a war crime.

Celia Hatten (2:50)

And Tom, I understand there's already been a response from the US State Department?

Tom Bateman (2:54)

Well, the State Department has put out a response to this because the fact-finding mission is appointed by the UN's Human Rights Council.

The US has long had an issue with the Human Rights Council. It withdrew from the Council itself some time ago and says in response to this report that the Council pushes, it says, anti-American rhetoric and anti-Semitism, all the while appeasing repressive regimes. As such, say the Americans, we do not give credibility to the findings of this report.

Celia Hatten (3:22)

Interesting because the State Department mentions anti-American rhetoric, but we should note that this UN report also criticized Iran's actions as well. Can you take us through that?

Tom Bateman (3:33)

Absolutely. I mean, this report is in two parts. And actually, this fact-finding mission was established in 2022, and it was largely to look at human rights abuses in Iran carried out by the regime.

And so there is a very lengthy section on the uprising and the protests that took place at the very end of last year, the late December into the new year, which the report says involved a widespread and systematic attack by the Iranian authorities against their own civilians. It talks about this having amounted to crimes against humanity in the view of the fact-finding mission, and goes into some detail about what took place involving unlawful killings, torture, arbitrary detention, and enforced disappearances. It talks about the official death toll that the Iranians had said had been killed in these clashes of more than 3,000 people. It says that the actual death toll was likely to be far higher than that official figure. And also they're saying including at least 221 children reportedly killed, some of those as young as 2 years old.

Celia Hatten (4:38)

Tom, I wonder, our listeners might be thinking, well, what next for these findings then? If human rights experts at the UN say there are grounds to believe the US committed war crimes and that the Iranians committed crimes against humanity, what can be done with those accusations?