Crowded Baghdad morgue a bellwether for mounting civilian casualties
BY MIKE DORNING
Chicago Tribune
BAGHDAD - (KRT) - There is little debate about the costs of war at the Baghdad city morgue, where the victims of military actions lie alongside those who die in the general mayhem that has afflicted the country since the U.S.-led invasion 18 months ago.
More than 300 people a month in Baghdad are dying from gunshot wounds, compared with an average of 15 per month in 2002, according to the morgue's statistics. Morgue staffers pile bodies waist-high on the concrete floors of the refrigeration units, said Taha Al-Haili, a pathologist there.
This month, one of the faces was familiar - a neighbor of Al-Haili who was shot by carjackers who stole the 27-year-old storekeeper's sedan.
"We had hidden mass graves before. Now we have open mass graves," Al-Haili said. "Really, it is the same thing: We are losing our people."
Even in Iraq, hardened by years of war with Iran and life under a brutal dictator, the post-invasion violence has left emotions raw. And it shows no signs of abating. At least 59 Iraqis were killed in fighting Sunday, and 20 more died Monday.
More than 1,000 U.S. soldiers have died since hostilities began; Iraqis have paid an even greater toll. The best estimate is that more than 10,000 Iraqis have been killed, including soldiers who died during the initial coalition advance toward Baghdad, rebels still fighting coalition forces, police struggling to bring order; and civilians caught in the crossfire.
Hundreds more are the victims of crime that erupted across the country with the fall of Saddam Hussein's government.
While the Iraqi death toll is difficult to determine, the injury toll is even more elusive. However, it is almost certain to be higher than the death figure. For U.S. troops in Iraq, there have been seven wounded for every one killed.
The difficulty in establishing a precise count of Iraqi casualties illuminates the disorder pervading the country. An unknown number of Iraqi soldiers were buried on the battlefield. With the collapse of the central government, no official death statistics were kept for more than a year. And during the past year, insurgents and bystanders alike have been buried swiftly by their families without their deaths being recorded.
The U.S. does not provide an estimate of battle-related Iraqi deaths; the Pentagon says it cannot be done with any accuracy.
But British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, whose country has the second-largest foreign military force in Iraq, estimated that 10,000 Iraqi civilians had died in the conflict by February, long before Sunni militants in Fallujah and followers of Shiite cleric Moqtada al Sadr launched insurgencies that inflamed the country.
Behind those numbers and the anger they fuel is a deadly pattern of rebel attacks and U.S.-led counterstrikes. The U.S. military has the most sophisticated weaponry ever made, but the battle against insurgents in Iraq has been fought in dense urban areas against a foe that blends into the larger population.
Despite U.S. efforts to reduce civilian casualties, they inevitably occur: a university professor killed when a raid on the basement apartment of his house triggered an explosion, a family on the road near Tikrit slain by a barrage of machine-gun fire after trying to pass a U.S. military convoy.
And the insurgency has adopted tactics that kill far more Iraqis than Americans. Bombs targeting U.S. vehicles explode along crowded city streets. Mortar and rocket attacks intended for military bases regularly land in residential areas.
Insurgents also intentionally kill large numbers of Iraqis in spectacular attacks intended to prove that the government and its American sponsors cannot keep Iraq safe. More than 180 Shiite pilgrims were killed in Karbala and Baghdad as they observed a religious holiday in March, and at least 10 people were killed in attacks on Christian churches last month. Car bombs explode several times a week at Iraqi police stations, government buildings, recruiting centers and hotels.
Many informal tallies do not distinguish between those who have died as a result of the fighting between the U.S. military and Iraqi insurgents and those killed amid the crime and chaos gripping Iraq. The Iraqi public rarely draws a distinction either.
"It is the blood of innocent people, the blood of my people," said Saled Abd Al-Hassam, a 23-year-old medical assistant at Baghdad's Al-Kindi Hospital, where many of the victims of military fighting and random crime are taken.
After living in a society tightly controlled by a fearsome dictator, Iraqis are no strangers to the threat of harm. But the current unpredictability is deeply unsettling. Speaking out against the government no longer will get you killed; an errant mortar or exploding car bomb will.
In choosing not to report publicly the number of enemy fighters killed, the U.S. abandoned the Vietnam War-era practice in which such tallies were a regular feature of military briefings and counts were inflated, providing a false impression of U.S. success.
Historians say the practice in Vietnam reflected the brand of warfare - a war of attrition, in which causing damage to the other side was more important than seizing territory.
"You had to count bodies (in Vietnam) because it was the only measuring stick you had," said Robert Brigham, a Vietnam expert at Vassar College. "So as the bodies started to mount, it became politicized."
Mindful of that, today's war planners have avoided discussing the subject. But in an unusual step, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld last week marked the death of the 1,000th U.S. soldier in Iraq by saying coalition forces probably had killed 1,500 to 2,500 former regime loyalists, criminals and terrorists in the past month alone.
Iraq Body Count, an organization run by anti-war activists in Britain and the United States, maintains a tally of Iraqi deaths based on media accounts. Its total does not include casualties among Iraqi armed forces or "instigators of violence" such as suicide bombers, though it does count deaths of Iraqi police, said spokesman John Sloboda.
The organization early this month estimated that nearly 14,000 Iraqis have died. But its estimates still are far below those of other sources. For example, the Iraqi Health Ministry recently reported that 2,956 Iraqis died from military strife or terrorist attacks between April 5 and Aug. 31 - 2 1/2 times as many as reported by Iraq Body Count in the same period.
Health officials say the lack of reliable figures for more than a year after the invasion hampered their work.
"We needed reliable figures and information in a number of health programs, and because of the lack of data we ran into problems when we planned programs," Iraq's Health Minister, Dr. Alaadin Alwan, said in an interview.
Possibly because of the lack of official figures or perhaps because American news media pay greater attention to casualties among U.S. troops, polls show that few Americans correctly estimate the toll the conflict has taken on Iraqis
When asked in a poll last month to estimate Iraqi civilian casualties so far, only 1 in 10 Americans said they thought more than 10,000 had died. More than half of those surveyed estimated that no more than 2,000 had died, according to the poll by the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland.
sanluisobispo.com |
