As the coalition bombs drop across Iraq, many anti-war protesters from around the world seeking to serve as human shields for the Iraqi people find themselves caught in the crossfire.

The London Independent reports a British human shield has not been heard from since the initial bombing last week. Leo Warren, 44, from Feltwell, Norfolk, is one of seven British human shields believed to be still in Iraq.

In his last e-mail to family hours prior to the initial "decapitation" airstrikes, Warren raised concerns that he and other members of the group were being manipulated by the Iraqi government.

GBU-31 precision-guided bomb loaded on F-16 Fighting Falcon

When the protesters arrived in Baghdad in February, they intended to position themselves at schools, orphanages and hospitals. But Iraqi officials ordered them to deploy at water-treatment centers, bridges and power plants.

"They removed us from the sites we had chosen because we were critical of the integrity and the autonomy of the Iraqi authorities," organizer Ken O'Keefe told the Christian Science Monitor before the conflict began.

As WorldNetDaily reported, O'Keefe is a former Marine who renounced his citizenship after his experience in the Gulf War, in which he claims the U.S. "conducted human experiments" on him by "its forced injection and ingestion of pyridostigmine bromide pills and anthrax and botulinum toxoid vaccines, which had not been approved for use on uninformed and non-consenting humans."

"The vast majority of people on this planet oppose this war," O'Keefe asserted on the BBC's "HARDtalk" program. "The United States intends to carry out this war because they need to dominate the world by controlling its oil reserves."

Australian Jake Nowakowski's human-shield mission with the Truth, Justice, Peace group lasted only three weeks. He told the London Telegraph he was manipulated by Iraqi authorities, and when he tried to defy them, he and five other human shields were kicked out of the country.

Nowakowski said his trip taught him that "things were a lot more complicated than they seemed in a lot of ways."

Even before the war got underway, many human shields reported a similar epiphany.

Daniel Pepper, a 23-year-old Jewish-American photographer, also admitted to the Telegraph that he had been duped by Saddam's secret police.

"Anyone with half a brain must see that Saddam has to be taken out. It is extraordinarily ironic that the anti-war protesters are marching to defend a government which stops its people exercising that freedom," Piper wrote.

"Perhaps the most crushing thing we learned was that most ordinary Iraqis thought Saddam Hussein had paid us to come to protest in Iraq," he added.

The Washington Times reports a group of U.S. anti-war demonstrators who visited Iraq with Japanese human-shield volunteers made it across the border into Jordan Saturday amid a crush of Iraqi refugees.

They say they have 14 hours of video not censored by Iraqi government minders.

One said the trip "shocked [him] back to reality." The Rev. Kenneth Joseph, an American pastor with the Assyrian Church of the East, told the Times that some of the Iraqis he interviewed on camera told him they would commit suicide if American bombing didn't start.

"They were willing to see their homes demolished to gain their freedom from Saddam's bloody tyranny," Joseph said. "They convinced me that Saddam was a monster the likes of which the world had not seen since Stalin and Hitler. He and his sons are sick sadists. Their tales of slow torture and killing made me ill, such as people put in a huge shredder for plastic products, feet first so they could hear their screams as bodies got chewed up from foot to head."

The Japanese government is frantically trying to persuade Japanese nationals serving as human shields to get out of Iraq before it's too late.

"It is the responsibility of the government to protect these people, and we and our colleagues in the region have been working hard to persuade them,'' Vice Foreign Minister Yukio Takeuchi told reporters at a Tokyo news conference.

Asahi Shimbun reports 15 Japanese members of anti-war groups remained in Iraq. Of these, seven have chosen to serve as human shields at strategic facilities in Baghdad. Five others are in Damascus waiting to enter.

Other human shields who have fled their posts remain resolute in their opposition to the war.

The South African Press Association today carries the report of a Muslim man from Durban who returned to South Africa today following a week-long stay in Iraq as a human shield.

"Being a human shield when they're throwing bombs won't help anybody," Mohammed Suleiman told the news agency shortly after arriving at the Johannesburg International Airport.

The car dealer said he was based at a water purification plant near Baghdad for three days about two miles from where the worst bombings took place.

"The bombings were terrible. They were bombing defenseless people – civilians," he said.

Suleiman said he feels satisfied he achieved his objective.

For those human shields that remain in Iraq, coalition leaders warn they may become casualties.

"It's a very dangerous place, and it is ill advised to go to the kind of area that Baghdad is right now with the regime and its activities – things like the fires, things like the bridges being rigged for demolition – it's not well advised. But people have their choices to make," said Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks at a Central Command briefing this morning. "Regardless of who the civilians are, we'll take every effort to try to minimize the potential effects on them. That's the best we can do. Unfortunately, there may be civilian casualties in the prosecution of war."

Meanwhile, Iraq has other human shields at its disposal. U.S. forces said yesterday they were treating several wounded civilians at a captured airbase in southern Iraq who said they had been used by Iraq's military.

At a press conference today, Air Force Maj. Gen. Victor Renuart accused Iraqi forces – the Fedayeen militia in particular – of "terrorizing neighborhoods" and using civilians as human shields.

"Human shields are a cowardly way to act on the battlefield," Renuart said. "We will not put our troops in the position where we would disregard the safety of any noncombatants."

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