The US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 amounted to a “crime against humanity” and those who planned it need to be held accountable for killing thousands of people, says an analyst in Canada.
Antonious J. Hall, the editor in chief of the American Herald Tribune, made the comments on Sunday, after it was announced that some British soldiers face allegations of mistreating Iraqi people during the war.
The UK-based Iraq Historic Allegations Team (IHAT) has launched a probe into the ill-treatment of two Iraqi citizens at the hand of British soldiers in the southern Iraqi city of Basra 13 years ago, the Guardian reported Sunday.
Faisal al-Saadoon and Khalaf Mufdhi were detained in 2003, after two British bomb disposal experts were captured during a militant ambush on their convoy and were shot dead later on.
“Of course, many terrible things happened in invasion of Iraq; this trial of 13 British soldiers is a small example; it is simply a snapshot of the kind of terror that was taking place,” Hall told Press TV on Sunday.
“We have the crime of the invasion of Iraq led by this Anglo-American coalition of Blair and Bush committing unbelievably grotesque crimes against humanity,” he added.
The analyst said IHAT’s investigation provided “merely a snapshot pointing to an unbelievably elaborate crime.”
Hall said all ongoing conflicts in the Middle East were ignited after the September 11, 2001 terror attacks and the extensive cover up of those crimes that took place need to be investigated.
In March 2003, the US and Britain invaded Iraq in a blatant violation of international law, over Iraq's “weapons of mass destruction,” but no such weapons were ever discovered in the country.
The invasion plunged Iraq into chaos, resulting in years of deadly violence and the rise of terrorist groups like Daesh (ISIL), while leaving more than one million Iraqis dead.