http://www.motherjones.com/news/dailymojo/2004/03/03_661.html March 30, 2004
Uncounted Dead
More than a year after the launch of the Iraqi War, the U.S. has no answer to a fairly straightforward question: how many Iraqis have been killed in the invasion and occupation of their country? The U.S. can't say how many Iraqis have been killed for a very simple reason: it doesn't keep count.
"We don't keep a list. It's just not policy," Pentagon spokeswoman Lieutenant Commander Jane Campbell explained to the New York Times earlier this month. The Pentagon may not keep track, but several organizations--with far fewer resources than the U.S. government--do.
The Iraqi Body Count Project, which tracks press accounts, puts the number of Iraqi civilians killed up to now at between 8,790 and 10,639. Last month, a report released by the influential Project on Defense Alternatives (PDA) stated that between 7,800-10,700 Iraqi combatants and between 3,200-4,300 civilians died during the combat phase of the war. The numbers were arrived at using journalistic surveys of Iraqi hospitals and death certificates, interviews with Iraqi military commanders, and other news reports, as well as U.S. records of its military operations.
The PDA charges that the Department of Defense has sought to mislead the public about the human toll of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. According to the PDA, the military exaggerated the extent to which its "precision warfare" minimized civilian casualties even as it claimed that it was impossible to get an accurate estimate of the dead. The military compounded this "casualty agnosticism" during the most publicized of wars with "casualty irrelevance" -- arguing that the body account was not an appropriate marker by which to judge the war’s success or failure.
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A year later, remembering the deadliest weapon
Iraq's Children of the Bomblet
by Kareem Fahim
March 23rd, 2004 12:45 PM
http://www.villagevoice.com/print/issues/0412/fahim.phpIn the months after the Iraq war, the unexploded bomblets sat idly in parks, sandlots, school yards, and fields, waiting for kids.
Nihad Jewad, like thousands of Baghdad's children, wandered out to play soccer in late April, after the fighting had stopped. His older brother wasn't sure whether Nihad picked up the device or fell on it. By the time he reached the Saudi-run field hospital, his left hand blown off along with the thumb on his right one, most of his life had flowed out of the blasted femoral artery in his leg.
As the doctors attempted to revive him, an American soldier guarding the clinic approached a photographer. "It's terrible about those land mines," he said, just like that. The comment struck the photographer as sarcastic. Or disingenuous, at least, since the boy clearly hadn't stepped on a mine. The clinic couldn't issue death certificates, nor did it supply coffins, so the Jewads would have to go to another hospital. Later that afternoon, Nihad's family buried him at the cemetery in Abu Ghreib.
The bomblets look like fun to kids. Shiny, tossable pieces of metal, they resemble a large D battery or a small hand grenade. Attached to the bottom are long, white ribbons, rather like streamers a child might fasten to the handlebars of a bike. Human Rights Watch (HRW) estimates that coalition forces left 2 million of these little bombs all over Iraq, killing or injuring perhaps a thousand civilians. Cluster munitions, the group reports, caused more harm to noncombatants than any other weapon during the war.
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