page_title: Cluster munition
section_title: Iraq
hierarchical_section_title: Cluster munition / History of use / Iraq
caption_attribution_description: English: An F/A-18C Hornet launches from the waist catapult during flight operations on board the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz (CVN 68) in the Persian Gulf on Nov. 11, 1997. The Nimitz and embarked Carrier Air Wing 9 are operating in the Persian Gulf in support of the U.S. and coalition enforcement of the no-fly-zone over Southern Iraq. The Hornet is armed with AIM-9 Sidewinder heat-seeking, short-range air-to-air missiles, AIM-7 Sparrow radar-guided air-to-air missiles, Rockeye cluster bombs, and the AGM-88 High Speed Anti-Radiation missile (HARM), used as an air-to-ground weapon to seek out and destroy enemy radar equipped air defense systems. The Hornet is assigned to Strike Fighter Squadron 147, Naval Air Station Lemoore, Calif.
context_page_description: A cluster munition is a form of air-dropped or ground-launched explosive weapon that releases or ejects smaller submunitions. Commonly, this is a cluster bomb that ejects explosive bomblets that are designed to kill personnel and destroy vehicles. Other cluster munitions are designed to destroy runways or electric power transmission lines, disperse chemical or biological weapons, or to scatter land mines. Some submunition-based weapons can disperse non-munitions, such as leaflets.
  Because cluster bombs release many small bomblets over a wide area, they pose risks to civilians both during attacks and afterwards. Unexploded bomblets can kill or maim civilians and/or unintended targets long after a conflict has ended, and are costly to locate and remove.
  Cluster munitions are prohibited for those nations that ratify the Convention on Cluster Munitions, adopted in Dublin, Ireland in May 2008. The Convention entered into force and became binding international law upon ratifying states on 1 August 2010, six months after being ratified by 30 states. As of 1 April 2018, a total of 120 states have joined the Convention, as 103 States parties and 17 Signatories.
context_section_description: Used by the United States and the United Kingdom
  1991: United States, France, and the United Kingdom dropped 61,000 cluster bombs, containing 20 million submunitions, on Iraq, according to the HRW.
  2003–2006: United States and allies attacked Iraq with 13,000 cluster munitions, containing two million submunitions during Operation Iraqi Freedom, according to the HRW. At multiple times, coalition forces used cluster munitions in residential areas, and the country remains among the most contaminated to this day, bomblets posing a threat to both US military personnel in the area, and local civilians.
  When these weapons were fired on Baghdad on April 7, 2003 many of the bomblets failed to explode on impact. Afterward, some of them exploded when touched by civilians. USA Today reported that "the Pentagon presented a misleading picture during the war of the extent to which cluster weapons were being used and of the civilian casualties they were causing." On April 26, General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that the US had caused only one civilian casualty.
caption: A US Navy F/A-18C Hornet launches from USS Nimitz to a mission in Southern Iraq. Among other weapons, the plane carries CBU-100 "Rockeye" cluster bombs.
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