1,361
Iraqis Killed In April
By Lee Keath
02 May, 2004
Associated Press
Volunteers
hunting for bodies in Fallujah find a woman and her daughter in their
home, killed in the siege but undiscovered for days. Chanting mourners
bury two boys caught in the crossfire of a Baghdad gunfight. A morgue
in Basra overflows with torn and burned bodies from a suicide bombing.
Victims _ young and old, women and men, insurgents and innocents _ have
been piling up day by day, making April the deadliest month for Iraqis
_ and Americans _ since the fall of Saddam Hussein a year ago.
Official and complete death counts for Iraqis nationwide are unavailable.
But a count by The Associated Press found that around 1,361 Iraqis were
killed from April 1 to April 30 _ 10 times the figure of at least 136
U.S. troops who died during the same period.
The Iraqi tally was compiled from daily records of violence reported
by AP based on statements issued by the U.S. military, Iraqi police
and local hospitals. The count includes civilians, insurgents and members
of the Iraqi security forces, though a detailed breakdown was not possible.
The Iraqi health ministry and the Red Crescent could not be reached
Friday.
Also, the tally is likely incomplete, because witnesses reported deaths
in some attacks that could not be confirmed by a hospital, the Iraqi
police or U.S. officials.
The daily carnage, seen by Iraqis before their own eyes and in bloody
images and photos transmitted around the country by Arab television
and Iraqi newspapers, has heightened anti-U.S. sentiment across the
country _ even when the deaths were caused by insurgent attacks.
The siege of Fallujah, where Americans unleashed their arsenal of warplanes
and tanks, became a symbol of resistance that rallied many Iraqis _
Shiite and Sunni _ to the anti-occupation cause.
And the sheer variety of violence _ car suicide bombs, roadside bombs,
insurgent rocket and mortar attacks on civilian neighborhoods, gunbattles
_ has deepened Iraqis' sense of instability and left them skeptical
of U.S. promises of peace and prosperity.
"For this to be happening a year after Saddam fell, Iraqis are
shocked," said Mahmoud Othman, a member of the U.S.-picked Governing
Council.
"This shows that the United States cannot rule Iraqi properly.
They thought they could do a better job than if they created an Iraqi
government right from the start."
The majority of Iraqi deaths likely took place in the Marine siege of
Fallujah, but the toll there has been a source of controversy. The head
of Fallujah's hospital, Rafie al-Issawi, said Friday his records show
731 killed and around 2,800 wounded since the Marine siege began on
April 1, though he could not immediately provide a breakdown on how
many were women or children. His number is factored into the AP count.
The Iraqi health minister, Khudayer Abbas, gave a much lower number
on April 22, saying 271 people were killed in the city. He also put
the total number of Iraqi dead for the month so far, including Fallujah,
at 576 _ far lower than the AP count.
U.S. officials have said they do not have a count of Iraqi civilians
killed this month. On April 20, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the top commander
of U.S. forces in Iraq, said troops had killed 1,000 insurgents in April.
That number was not factored into the AP count because it was not known
what specific battles he was referring to.
By comparison, the next deadliest month for Iraqis since the start of
the U.S. occupation was March, when 301 Iraqi civilians were killed,
according to the Brookings Institution, which keeps a rough but widely
respected monthly tally.
The Brookings number does not include insurgent or Iraqi police deaths,
as the AP's April tally does. But at the most, a few dozen armed Iraqis
died in March, not nearly enough to reach the number of April's dead.
The April toll still falls short of the number of Iraqi deaths during
the U.S. invasion. An AP survey of records from 60 of Iraq's 124 hospitals
found that at least 3,240 civilians died from March 20, 2003, to April
20, 2003; the complete number during that period is sure to be significantly
higher.
The AP count includes single attacks that caused large numbers of casualties.
In Basra, 74 people were killed when suicide attackers set off five
car bombs nearly simultaneously outside police stations on April 21.
A day earlier, a mortar barrage by guerrillas against Baghdad's largest
prison, Abu Ghraib, killed 22 prisoners, all of them detainees held
on suspicion of being members of the insurgency.
It also includes U.S. reports of insurgents killed in fighting with
American troops. The military said 100 Sunni guerrillas were killed
in a fierce battle April 12-13 in the village of Karma, outside Fallujah,
and that 64 Shiite militiamen died Monday in U.S. airstrikes and a firefight
outside Najaf, south of Baghdad.
But many of the deaths came in small incidents around Baghdad or scattered
around the country as violence stretched from the far north to the far
south.
A volley of mortars hit the eastern Baghdad neighborhood of Sadr City
on Saturday, some hitting a market, killing six people. Another shell
pierced a home, went through two floors and tore a woman sleeping in
her bed to pieces.
In Baghdad on Thursday, Mostapha Fadhl, 6, and Mostapha Salah, 7, were
playing near a road in western Baghdad when insurgents attacked a U.S.
patrol nearby. In the gunbattle that ensued, the boys were wounded and
later died.
The carnage in Fallujah, where U.S. Marines battled to uproot Sunni
insurgents from their greatest stronghold, traumatized an entire city.
Residents blame many of the deaths on Marine snipers or bombings by
warplanes, including fearsome AC-130 gunships and F-18s dropping 500-pound
bombs.
Two football fields were turned into cemeteries, with hundreds of freshly
dug graves, marked with wooden planks scrawled with names _ some with
names of women, some marked specifically as children. At one of the
fields, an AP reporter was told by volunteer gravediggers on April 11
that more than 300 people had been buried there.
On Friday, with the U.S. military trying to implement a tentative deal
to lift the siege, volunteers drove around looking for the dead that
never made it to hospitals or graveyards. At least eight highly decomposed
bodies were loaded into station wagons, including those of a woman and
her daughter found in a home in the Golan neighborhood, scene of heavy
fighting this week.
During the height of the siege, residents were unable to get outside,
so an unknown number of dead were buried in backyards.
"We buried two of my relatives at home," said Ahmed Ghanim
al-Ali, a doctor at one of five local clinics in Fallujah that have
been treating the wounded and counting the dead. "We cannot give
the total number of martyrs."
___
AP correspondents Abdul-Qader Saadi and Bassem Mroue in Fallujah contributed
to this report.