From: "J. van Baardwijk" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > I find it pretty much impossible to consider it a mistake. Ambulances are > quite good at being identifiable as being an ambulance. There is > international agreement that ambulances are NOT legitimate targets. Every > soldier knows this. > > So, when a soldier knows that an ambulance is not to be fired at, and that > ambulance can easily being identified as being an ambulance, why would that > soldier still fire on it? I can think of only one explanation: cold blooded > murder.
This is completely off topic as far as the Mid East goes, and no inference should be taken that I support the targetting of ambulances. But... You know all those stories of pilots in their parachutes being fired on? It turns out that the rules of war allow for different treatment depending on WHERE that act occurs. If the pilot is bailing out over his own territory then he is legitimately a target, even when in a parachute. If he bails out over enemy territory, then he is NOT allowed to be fired on whilst using his parachute. The reason behind this is that, by parachuting over his own territory (say as a Spitfire pilot over Britain or an Iraqi pilot over Iraq) he is soon going to be back into another aircraft. This means he is still a combatant. However, by bailing out over enemy territory he is most likely to end up as a POW and so is no longer a combatant. This argument/justification was used at highest levels of the RAF (at least) during the Battle of Britain, and was one they accepted. The public, though, was never informed and any cases of Germans firing on departing Spitfire/Hurricane pilots were played up in the newspapers. Where it gets murky, though, is in those verified cases where British fighters shot down Heinkel seaplanes, all clearly marked with red crosses, that were picking up downed German pilots from the English Channel. British reasoning was that they were being returned to combat and so were still combatants. Not all Allied or Axis pilots shot at parachuting pilots, but a lot did. The same argument was used, and upheld, following the Battle of the Bismark Sea, where RAAF and USAAF aircraft sank a large Japanese troop convoy off New Guinea and then spent the next few days machine gunning any survivors. Much of this was filmed. And then there are Hospital Ships, which are supposed to be untouchable in any circumstance.
