25,000 Civilians Killed since Iraq Invasion

[coda]

I generally hear an estimate of over 100,000.

25,000 Civilians Killed since Iraq Invasion, Says Report
By Simon Jeffery
The Guardian UK

Tuesday 19 July 2005

The number of Iraqi civilians who met violent deaths in the two years after the US-led invasion was today put at 24,865 by an independent research team.

The figures, compiled from Iraqi and international media reports, found US and coalition military forces were responsible for 37% of the deaths, with anti-occupation forces and insurgents responsible for 9%. A further 36% were blamed on criminal violence.

Civilian deaths attributed to US and coalition military forces peaked in the invasion period from March to May 2003 - which accounts for 30% of all civilian deaths in the two-year period - but the longer-term trend has been for increasing numbers to die at the hands of insurgents.

Figures obtained last week from the Iraqi interior ministry put the average civilian and police officer death toll in insurgent attacks from August 2004 to March 2005 at 800 a month.

John Sloboda of the Iraq Body Count project (http://www.iraqbodycount.net/), which co-authored the report with Oxford Research Group(http://www.oxfordresearchgroup.org.uk/home.htm), said the Iraqi civilian death toll was the "forgotten cost" of the decision to go to war in Iraq.

"On average, 34 Iraqis every day have met violent deaths since the invasion of March 2003," he said at the launch of the report in London.

"Our data shows that no sector of Iraqi society has escaped. We sincerely hope this research will help to inform decision makers around the world about the real needs of the Iraqi people as they struggle to rebuild their country."

The Iraq Body Count project is the most complete attempt of its kind to record the civilian dead in Iraq. The researchers work from media reports, information from mortuary officials and on-the-ground research projects. Its figures, which the group regards as conservative estimates, do not include irregular fighters or others who died while attacking coalition or Iraqi government forces.

Neither the US nor the UK, the former occupying powers, provide figures for the numbers of Iraqi civilian dead.

The figures up to March 2005 do not include the period since the elected Shia-led government of Ibrahim al-Jaafari, the Iraqi prime minister, took office and the insurgency has worked at an increasing rate to kill Iraqi civilians and police officers.

In the past week, suicide bombers have wreaked havoc in Baghdad and towns in the so-called triangle of death, to the south of the capital. Bombers also struck with devastating effect in the northern cities of Kirkuk and Mosul.

In the deadliest bombing, one of at least 10 on Saturday, more than 98 people were killed and 130 injured in Musayyib, south of Baghdad, after a suicide bomber blew up a fuel tanker near a crowded marketplace and in front of a Shia mosque.

Insurgents today killed 13 people in an ambush on a bus carrying Iraqi workers to a US airbase north-east of Baghdad near the city of Baqouba. One of the 15 Sunni Arabs appointed to a committee to draft Iraq's constitution, Mijbil Issa, was later assassinated in a drive-by shooting with two companions in the Karradah area of Baghdad.

According to the Iraq Body Count report, 53% of those who died in the two years since the invasion were killed by explosive devices. Half of the total number died in Baghdad, and a fifth were women and children.

The deteriorating security situation has alarmed Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq's leading Shia cleric, who urged the Iraqi government to protect the people in "this genocidal war", according to the vice-president, Adil Abdul-Mahdi, who held a meeting with him at the weekend.

Moqtada al-Sadr, a Shia radical cleric, who last summer led a rebellion against US forces in the Shia holy city of Najaf, blamed the violence in Iraq on the presence of US and other foreign forces.

"The occupation in itself is a problem," he told BBC Newsnight last night. "Iraq not being independent is the problem. And the other problems stem from that - from sectarianism to civil war, the entire American presence causes this."

A report published last year in the medical journal the Lancet suggested the chances of a violent death in Iraq were 58 times higher after the invasion than before it.

Researchers from Johns Hopkins University and Columbia University in the US and the Al-Mustansiriya University in Baghdad put the civilian death toll at up to 100,000 since the invasion.

The study was based on interviews with Iraqis, most of them doctors, but conceded

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[monkeydust]

People always give the 100,000 figure because it was the biggest estimate made and that makes it sound all the more "worse" than it might be.

The reality is that we don't know how many have died with much certainty, but, seeing as this supposedly scrupulous estimate puts it much lower than 100,000, perhaps we should aim a lot lower than we have previously - in the 25-50,000 bracket, for instance.

Whatever the truth of the matter, I think 25,000 is bad enough to make the invasion far less justified than it would have been.

[mo7amEd]

25,000... I think it is higher than that.

[Sons_of_Eureka]

If you count the lack of social services and shortages of medicine,clean water,food and fuel i think the death toll would be much higher than 100,000.

And the effects of depleted uranium will cause havoc to generations to come.

[mo7amEd]

Originally posted by [email protected] 22 2005, 11:46 AM
If you count the lack of social services and shortages of medicine,clean water,food and fuel i think the death toll would be much higher than 100,000.

And the effects of depleted uranium will cause havoc to generations to come.
exactly!

[Severian]

Originally posted by [email protected] 22 2005, 05:46 AM
If you count the lack of social services and shortages of medicine,clean water,food and fuel i think the death toll would be much higher than 100,000.
Right. If anyone is even keeping numbers on infant mortality, etc., I haven't seen them. Deaths that are not directly from violence are often not seen...even though most of the toll of war is often from famine and disease, not directly from violence.

The 100,000 estimate was for all violent deaths, not just civilians. Nor should we just oppose civilian deaths...the thousands of Iraqi soldiers slaughtered during the invasion were also working people for the most part.

A Swiss institute concluded, from reexamining the study's data, that about 40,000 of those 100,000 estimated dead were civilians. (http://www.news.com.au/story/print/0,10119,15901983,00.html)

The Iraqi Body Count numbers (25,000 civilians) are a count, of deaths reported by the media or Ministry of Health, not an estimate....may be low but can't be high. They are including police as civilians I think.

The Guardian writes "The figures, compiled from Iraqi and international media reports, found US and coalition military forces were responsible for 37% of the deaths, with anti-occupation forces and insurgents responsible for 9%. A further 36% were blamed on criminal violence."

And a further 11% on "unknown agents", a euphemism for car-bombings and other attacks on civilian targets, which "al-Qaeda in Iraq" and similar groups openly take responsibility for. And that's the total for the whole period of the invasion and occupation.

The liberal group EPIC (http://www.epic-usa.org/Default.aspx?tabid=1046), examining the Iraqi Body Count numbers, concludes:

According to data collected by Iraq Body Count, some numbers appear to be declining. “Unnatural deaths” recorded in Baghdad city morgues have steadily fallen from a peak of 2,283 in the first 6 months of 2004 to 1,309 through June 1st of this year. Since most of these deaths are attributed to crime, it suggests a decline in violent crime and progress being made by a growing Iraqi police force in Baghdad. Data from Iraq Body Count also suggests a sharp downturn in civilian deaths attributed to U.S. and coalition military operations: from 1,701 in 2004 to 105 during the first six months of this year. EPIC believes this final number may be due to far fewer air attacks in 2005, which were sited as a primary cause of civilian deaths by the Iraq Mortality Survey published last year in The Lancet.

However, the number of Iraqis killed by the insurgency in 2005 is now almost double the number of Iraqis killed in the first 6 months of 2004. In Baghdad alone, there were more car bombs in May than in all of 2004 combined. Insurgent attacks are the leading cause of conflict-related deaths among civilians so far this year - by a margin of 15 to 1.

I've been through the IBC's dossier and looked at their month-by-month numbers and this seems plausible. See my post in the Iraqi Resistance thread.

Let me suggest that in this situation, civilian casualties are not the most effective argument against the occupation. And when this argument's made by supporters of the resistance, downright hypocritical.

Indeed, the whole Geneva Convention-based concept of avoiding civilian casualties is likely to be an ineffective way of opposing many U.S. wars in future. Now that a large proportion of its bombs are guided, they can plausibly claim to wage a more "civilized" war than anyone else. E.g. they inflicted many more military than civilian casualties, and avoided destroying most infrastructure, during the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

It's necessary to explain the objectives of their wars, and how the target of the bosses' war drive is ultimately working people, in the U.S. as well as worldwide.

[YKTMX]

Whatever the truth of the matter, I think 25,000 is bad enough to make the invasion far less justified than it would have been.



If no one had died the war would still have been wrong.