A former American sniper says US soldiers had no clear understanding of who the enemy was in Iraq and often “went off the playbook” when opening fire in the battlefield. “We weren’t fighting a common uniformed enemy and there was actually a lot of confusion on who our enemy was, whether they were foreign combatants coming into Iraq or whether they were Iraqi resistance fighters or al-Qaeda or a specific Sunni or Shia group, we never really knew,” Garett Reppenhagen told Press TV on Saturday. While US military personnel received a “brief summary” of Rules of Engagement and the Geneva Conventions, “it was not very thorough,” he pointed out.

US troops were not always abiding by the Geneva Conventions in Iraq, the former sniper said. “It gave a lot of service members kind of an excuse to go off the playbook.” Reppenhagen said that Rules of Engagement kept changing in the theater and “nobody really knew what the changes were day to day. “Many units made up their own Rules of Engagement as they went,” he continued. In 2003, former President George W. Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq under the pretext that the former Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein, had an active weapons of mass destruction program.

In October 2004, however, a CIA report revealed that Saddam did not possess any weapons of mass destruction at the time of the invasion. Reppenhagen characterized the invasion and occupation of Iraq as a “failure” which only destabilized the country and paved the way for different terrorist groups to emerge. “I felt like US occupation there only caused more chaos, harm and destabilization.” “Chaos after the ‘shock and awe’ initial invasion and botched occupation of the country allowed al-Qaeda and different terrorist organizations like ISIS (or ISIL) to emerge. I feel like those would have never come about if it wasn’t for the US occupation of Iraq,” he stated.

“So I think in a lot of ways we decreased our own national security and international credibility through the use of force in Iraq,” he added.Reppenhagen was deployed to Iraq in January, 2004 and was stationed at FOB Scunion near Baquaba, Iraq for one year. He carried out some sniper missions in the Diyala region.Asked whether the US has supported American soldiers coming home from wars, Reppenhagen said the Department of Veterans Affairs is not funded adequately and has done a poor job helping the veterans. “I don’t think that the United States government has adequately helped the veterans coming home. I believe that the VA here in America is very underfunded and there is a lot of treatments that are not funded through the VA and there is a lot of veterans that are waiting an extremely long time to get care, to get compensation for their injuries,” he said.

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