Thousands in Baghdad alone
Counting dead and wounded civilians
By Leslie Feinberg
How many Iraqi civilians were killed in the
war? The pro-Pentagon media in the United States are generally
silent on the subject. But in Baghdad, death notices,
hand-printed in yellow and white, flap in the wind from
lampposts, trees and buildings.
One exception among the commercial newspapers here is the
Los Angeles Times, which on May 19 reported on the findings of
a survey it took of hospitals. It found that in Baghdad alone
at least 1,700 civilians were confirmed dead and more than
8,000 injured.
In addition, undocumented civilian deaths in the capital and
its outlying districts number at least in the hundreds and
could mount to 1,000, based on reports by Islamic burial
societies and groups trying to trace the missing.
U.S. military brass, governing the military occupation of
Iraq, have "no plans to try to tally the civilian dead," the
article stated.
Pentagon spokesperson Lt. Col. Dave Lapan brushed off the
suggestion: "We have no way of verifying independently whether
people who were killed were civilians or not civilians."
But, the article pointed out, "even soldiers who shed their
uniforms and threw away their weapons often continued to carry
some form of identification."
And, Dr. Mahmoud Kubisi explains, "Some of them would murmur
to us they were soldiers, because they wanted us to be able to
help find their families if they died."
Iraqi hospital personnel kept meticulous records of patient
information and military affiliation. Even after the U.S.
command allowed massive looting of the hospitals, staff managed
to reassemble data based on notations, patient charts and
morgue attendant tallies.
At Monsour Hospital in central
Bagh dad, a four-hospital complex dub bed Medical City, doctors
report that U.S. troops seized and removed their casualty
records.
The city's registry of births and deaths wants to compile an
official reckoning of war dead, but it may take months.
During the war, hospitals could not handle all the bodies of
those who died. Many were buried on the grounds of the
facility. Mosques helped bury bodies found in cars and
buildings.
Youths, some of them 15 and 16, volunteered to help bury the
decomposing bodies, "despite the extreme danger of moving about
in the initial days of the American military presence," the
article noted.
"They were very brave," said Hashim Qureishi, an engineer
who organized a group of volunteers. "It was terrible work,
though, very terrible."
Haidar Tari, in charge of tracing missing people for the
Iraqi Red Crescent, estimated there may have been up to 3,000
such undocumented burials--perhaps as many as one-third of them
civilian deaths.
More bodies may be found in areas under U.S. military
control where the brass has barred access to the Red
Crescent.
William M. Arkin, senior fellow at the Center for Strategic
Education at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced
International Studies, said that when the final toll is
registered, the number of Iraqi civilians who died in the war
will probably be "many thousands."
Reprinted from the May 29, 2003, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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