Civilian Death Toll in Iraq Put at 3,240

By Niko Price
Associated Press
The Boston Globe Online http://www.boston.com/
Wednesday, June 11, 2003

Nationwide total doesn't account for some battles, towns

BAGHDAD -- Someone has taped together the shredded binding, as if that could fix the horrors inside. There are pages bathed in dried, reddish-brown blood, their letters smeared and unintelligible.

The frantic scribblings and bloody handprints are a record of war.

This ledger at Kadhamiya General Hospital is one of dozens of documents reviewed by The Associated Press over five weeks in an effort to count the civilian casualty toll from a month of fighting.

The finding: At least 3,240 civilians died throughout the country, including 1,896 in Baghdad. The count is still fragmentary, and the complete number, if it is ever tallied, is sure to be much higher.

Several surveys have looked at civilian casualties within Baghdad, but this is the first attempt to gauge the scale of such deaths from one end of the country to the other, from Mosul in the north to Basra in the south.

The count is based on records from 60 of Iraq's 124 hospitals, including almost all of the large ones, and covers the period between March 20, when the war began, and April 20, when the fighting was dying down. Journalists visited the hospitals, studied their logs, examined death certificates when available, and interviewed officials.

Many of the 64 other hospitals are in small towns and were not visited because they are in dangerous or inaccessible areas. Some hospitals that were visited had incomplete or damaged records on casualties.

Even if hospital records were complete, they would not tell the full story for this nation of 24 million. Many of the dead were never taken to hospitals; they were either buried quickly by their families in accordance with Islamic custom or lost under rubble.

The journalists excluded all counts done by hospitals whose written records did not distinguish between civilian and military dead, which means hundreds, possibly thousands, of victims in the largest cities and most intense battles aren't reflected in the total.

The US military did not count civilian casualties because ''our efforts are focused on military tasks,'' said Lieutenant Colonel Jim Cassella, a Pentagon spokesman. The British Defense Ministry said it didn't count casualties either.

In the 1991 Gulf War, an estimated 2,278 civilians were killed, according to Iraqi civil defense authorities. No official US count is known to have been made. That war consisted of seven weeks of bombing and 100 hours of ground war; it did not take US forces into any Iraqi cities.

This time it was very different. In a war in which Saddam Hussein's soldiers melted away into crowded cities, changed into plainclothes, or wore no uniform to begin with, separating civilian and military casualties was often impossible.

Adding to the civilian toll was the regime's tactic of parking its troops and weapons in neighborhoods, creating targets for US bombs that increased the casualties among noncombatants.

The reasons for some high-casualty attacks have yet to be fully resolved. For instance, on March 28 a missile landed on a sidewalk in a crowded marketplace in the Baghdad district of al-Shoala. Iraqi officials said 58 civilians were killed by a US airstrike. Central Command said at the time that it was investigating, but spokesman Captain John Morgan now says no inquiry was conducted. Central Command neither confirmed nor denied firing the missile.

The great majority of civilian deaths appear to have been caused by US and British attacks, but witnesses say some -- even a rough estimate is impossible -- were caused by the Iraqis themselves: by exploding ammunition stored in neighborhoods, by falling antiaircraft rounds aimed at coalition warplanes, or by fire directed at coalition troops.

The United States said its sophisticated weaponry minimized the toll, and around the country are sites that, to look at them, bolster the assertion: missiles that tore deep into government buildings but left the surrounding houses untouched.

''Did the Americans bomb civilians? Yes. But one should be realistic,'' said Dr. Hameed Hussein al-Aaraji, the new director of Baghdad's al-Kindi Hospital. ''Saddam ran a dirty war. He put weapons inside schools, inside mosques. What could they do?''

Like the register at Kadhamiya General Hospital, other ledgers across the country record the names, ages, and addresses of patients; the diagnoses and operations; the recoveries and the deaths. They also list professions: butcher, carpenter, soldier, student, policeman.

Some of the best record-keeping was in Baghdad, where journalists visited all of the 24 hospitals that took in war casualties. Their logs provided a count of 1,896 civilians killed. There were certainly more civilians dead; a few hospitals lost count as the fighting intensified.

In some parts of the country, records are more spotty. The three civilian hospitals in Basra, Iraq's second-largest city, recorded the deaths of 413 people. Doctors estimate that 85 percent were civilian, but they have no evidence. The journalists didn't include the numbers from Basra in their count.

Some hospitals that began keeping records at the beginning of the war had to stop. The fighting came to them -- in some cases, through their front doors.

Doctors at Nasiriyah's Republic Hospital said seven patients were killed in their beds when a shell hit the building April 7. At Baghdad's Yarmouk Hospital, doctors fled when US tanks shelled a hospital building seized by Iraqi fighters. When they returned five days later, 26 patients were dead.

It will take months or more before anything like a final count emerges. One survey is being done by the advocacy group Human Rights Watch, another by the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict, which hopes to win US compensation for victims or their relatives. Meanwhile, from city to city, block to block, house to house, Iraqis are trying to come to terms with their losses. For them, it matters little whether the casualty count is 3,000, double that, or more.

''If they didn't want to kill civilians, why did they fire into civilian areas?'' asked Ayad Jassim Ibrahim, a 32-year-old Basra fireman who said his brother Alaa was killed by shrapnel from a US missile that struck his living room.

Aaraji, the doctor, sees things differently. ''It was a war,'' he said. ''This is the price of liberty.''

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