I never met Asrar Qabandi, but it’s safe to say she shared my shock as we awakened in Kuwait on August 2, 1990, to discover that Iraq had invaded the tiny Gulf emirate under the cover of darkness.

As a correspondent for The Washington Post, I set out to report on the chaotic scene unfolding under the sullen, gray skies of early morning. Tanks were rolling by the hotel and a fierce artillery battle was going on just blocks away. Qabandi, meanwhile, set off on a far more daring and dangerous venture.

The thirty-one-year-old Kuwaiti, who had gotten a master’s degree in computer science in Colorado, left her father’s home, adopted a bogus identity, and joined the Kuwaiti resistance. Using a hidden satellite telephone, she faxed information to exiled Kuwaiti leaders and gave interviews to CNN. She transported guns and money to Kuwaiti fighters, hid Westerners from Iraqi troops, picked up injured fighters in ambulances, and smuggled government documents out of Kuwait. The sixth of ten children, Qabandi was forthright, outspoken, and determined.

But the Iraqis discovered her and in November she was arrested at a checkpoint. For the next two months, she was held at Meshatil agricultural research station, which the Iraqis had turned into a detention and torture center. She was beaten, then chained to a desk for the first seventeen days of her captivity. On January 14, 1991, just three days before the war to free Kuwait began, Qabandi’s body was dumped outside her family home. She had four bullets in her stomach and one between her eyes. The right side of her face had been sliced with an ax. Her hands were tied with plastic tubing.

Qabandi’s death was murder. It was also a war crime because it violated the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention which in Section III sets out the rules on the belligerent occupation of a foreign territory. Under the laws of war, territory is considered occupied when a foreign power actually controls it.

Iraq justified its invasion of Kuwait by claiming that it originally belonged to Iraq and then annexed it as its “nineteenth province.” No other State accepted that claim. The international community held Iraq to its obligations under the Fourth Geneva Convention as an occupying power, specifically, to respect the rights of protected persons under its control.

It is true that in Qabandi’s case, the Iraqi government might have tried to cite provisions in Section III that allow occupying powers to arrest and punish resisters. In fact, occupying powers can repeal or suspend local laws where they are a threat to its security or that block implementation of the Fourth Geneva Convention. An occupying power may even institute provisions for maintaining “the orderly government of the territory” and protecting the property and lines of communication of the occupying army or administration. But this right is subject to wide-ranging conditions which state that: an accused has the right to a lawyer and a regular trial, where he or she can present and call witnesses and has the right to appeal the verdict; the occupying power must respect and apply the provisions of local laws which it does not suspend or repeal; while an occupier has the right to bring offenders before its own military courts, those courts must sit in the occupied territory and be nonpolitical. In other words, their aim cannot be political persecution; a death sentence may be imposed only for serious crimes, including espionage and sabotage resulting in death, and only after the court takes into account that an accused, not being a national of the occupying power, has no duty to be loyal to it. If imposed, the death sentence may not be carried out until at least six months after the occupying power has notified an outside government charged with protecting the civilians of the occupied territory.

Apart from these restrictions, the convention specifically prohibits torture, murder, corporal punishments, mutilation, and “any other measures of brutality.”

Iraq violated Section III of the convention in other ways as well: Iraq barred the departure of foreign nationals, including Americans, Europeans, Thais, Indians, and Filipinos, among others. The convention says that foreign nationals have the right to leave occupied territory, though the occupying power can object to this when its national interests make it absolutely necessary. Iraq’s national interests did not appear to threatened by the departure of foreign nationals from Kuwait; hundreds of Kuwaitis were arrested during the occupation and transferred to prisons in Iraq. In the last days of the occupation, about fifteen hundred men were rounded up and taken to Iraq, presumably as hostages of war. These actions violated several provisions of the conventions that ban the deportation of civilians from the occupied territory, the taking of hostages, and the physical or moral coercion of civilians, particularly to obtain information; Iraq encouraged its citizens to move to Kuwait and settle there. Although this did not occur on a large scale, it violated the conventions, one of whose provisions states that the occupying power shall not transfer its civilian population into occupied territory. Other Iraqi violations of the conventions included the failure to allow Kuwaitis access to humanitarian relief and to the International Committee of the Red Cross facilities for tracking prisoners; the withholding of normal medical care from Kuwaitis in some hospitals; the theft of State and personal property, including the transfer of thousands of automobiles from showrooms and private garages and the plundering of university libraries and scientific laboratories.

Pillage is forbidden by the conventions, yet Iraq destroyed or set ablaze royal palaces, the National Assembly, the Foreign Ministry, some museums, and hundreds of oil wells.

None of the Iraq’s violations of Section III on occupied territories described here—all of which appear to meet the legal definition of violations of international humanitarian law—have been judicially addressed by any international tribunal. The Western powers that led the international effort to reverse Iraq’s occupation of Kuwait have made no serious effort to prosecute any Iraqi official for these alleged war crimes, in part because they do not have any of these officials in custody or any reasonable expectation for the moment of apprehending them.

Still, the record of these violations of international humanitarian law and war crimes is there in the statements of Kuwaitis taken by journalists, human rights workers, and others. This will not help Asrar Qabandi and the scores of other Kuwaitis who, like her, were illegally executed and deposited on their families’ doorsteps. But it ensures that what happened is no longer secret. In Qabandi’s case this is especially poignant because her first name, Asrar, means “secrets.”

(See due process; unlawful confinement.)