USA/UK/Iraq: 37,000 civilians reported dead in invasion
01 August 2004
Aljazeera.net has reported that an Iraqi political group, The People's Kifah (Struggle Against Hegemony), has estimated that nearly 37,000 Iraqi civilians died in the period between March and October 2003. The statistics were compiled by a UK-based physiology professor, Al-Ubaidi, and have been "vouched for" by the deputy general secretary and spokesman for
Aljazaeera.net, Muhammed al-Ubaidi, who said:
We are 100% sure that 37,000 civilian deaths is a correct estimate. Our study...involved hundreds of Iraqi activists and academics...For the collation of our statistics we visited the most remote villages, spoke and coordinated with grave diggers across Iraq, obtained information from hospitals and spoke to thousands of witnesses who saw incidents in which Iraqi civilians were killed by US fire.
The survey ceased in October 2003 after one of the group's workers was arrested by Kurdish militias and handed over to the US occupation authorities. His fate is unknown, but al-Ubaidi fears that he may have been tortured or "disappeared", as have other prisoners held by the US military in Abu Ghraib prison.
To date there are no reliable official estimates of Iraqi civilian casualties as the interim Iraqi government has not published any statistics. The US and UK occupation authorities have also refused to provide figures, the US General, Tommy Franks, explaining "We don't do body counts" - not Iraqi civilian body counts, anyway. As of 21 September 2004 there were 1,178 coalition military forces killed, (1,043 Americans, 66 Britons, six Bulgarians, one Dane, two Dutch, one Estonian, one Hungarian, 19 Italians, one Latvian, 13 Poles, one Salvadorean, three Slovaks, 11 Spaniards, two Thais and eight Ukranians).
A recent report by the Washington-based
Knight Ridder, based on statistical data compiled by the Iraqi Health ministry and leaked to them, recorded 3,487 Iraqi civilian deaths in 15 of the country's 18 provinces between April and September 2004. Of these 328 were women and children. A further 13,720 Iraqis were injured. In August alone, 1,100 Iraqis -"overwhelmingly civilians" - were killed. Iraqi officials said about two-thirds of the Iraqi deaths were caused by multinational forces and police. The remaining third died from insurgent attacks. The officials told
Knight Ridder: "the statistics proved that US air strikes intended for insurgents were also killing large numbers of innocent civilians" and that the "aggressive US military operations...could backfire." It has been reported by the Associated Press that the Health Ministry has been ordered to stop releasing figures to the press as US and Iraqi government forces build their campaign against the Iraqi resistance to coincide with US presidential elections.
A number of unofficial estimates exist for Iraqi victims of the US-led invasion. The UK-based Iraqi Body Count (IBC), which is run by a small group of academics and peace activists, estimates that 13-15,000 civilian deaths resulted from the US-led intervention. The IBC has called for an independent commission to be set up in Iraq to give the best estimate of how each person died. The US-based Brookings Institute combines the IBC's figures with projections for deaths caused by violent crime resulting from the collapse of Iraq's infrastructure following the invasion to reach an estimate of up to 25,000 victims between May 2003 and August 2004.
The UK Ministry of Defence, like the Pentagon, does not record the number of Iraqi's killed, but Foreign Minister Jack Straw opined to the BBC in May that the death toll was around 10,000. Straw found it "odd" that the coalition did not compile figures. The Foreign Office later pointed out that Straw's estimate "was not an official figure" and doubted if one will ever be obtained - despite a legal obligation, under the Geneva Convention, to do so.
The Brookings Institution "Iraq Index: Tracking Variables of Reconstruct