Human shield action to Iraq

Human shield action to Iraq was a group of people who travelled to Iraq to act as human shields with the aim of preventing the U.S.-led coalition troops from bombing certain locations during the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

In December 2002 Kenneth O'Keefe, an ex-U.S. Marine and Gulf War veteran who had attempted multiple times to renounce his U.S. citizenship, posted a call to action for large numbers of western citizens to migrate to Iraq and deploy themselves as "Human Shields". The action was ultimately named the TJP (Truth Justice Peace) Human Shield Action to Iraq. O'Keefe believed that protests and petitions had no chance of preventing the invasion and that a large presence of western citizens, strategically placed in Iraq at potential targets, was the only viable deterrent to war. He argued that thousands of human shields deployed to these sites would make the invasion politically untenable. O'Keefe publicly acknowledged Saddam Hussein as a "violent dictator" and "mass-murderer" before he arrived in Iraq; it has been speculated he did this in an attempt to neutralize the perception that the human shields were simply pawns of Saddam. Consequently, he received no favor from Saddam, his influence within the action declined rapidly as he traveled to Iraq, and eventually he was deported days before the invasion. Before his deportation he repeatedly alleged U.S. and British support for Hussein during some of his worst crimes; ultimately he argued that it was the people of Iraq who would suffer most from war.

In January 2003 a group of anti-war activists joined O'Keefe in London and set out to carry out the plan. On 25 January 2003 a group of 50 volunteers left London and headed for Baghdad with the intention of acting as human shields. The convoy travelled through Europe and Turkey by bus and picked up more volunteers along the way, totalling roughly 75 people. It has been estimated that 200 to 500 people eventually made their way into Iraq before the invasion in March.

Upon reaching Baghdad, a strategy was formed on the assumption that there would not be enough human shields to avert an invasion. This was to involve the voluntary deployment of activists to strategic locations throughout Baghdad, and possibly Basra, in an effort to avert the bombing of those locations. There was much internal debate about which locations were to be chosen.

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