Counting
The Civilian Cost In Iraq
By Matthew Davis
23 September, 2004
BBC
News Online
More than 1,000 US soldiers have been
killed since the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. Other coalition allies
are mourning dozens of their own fighting men and women.
Thousands
of Iraqi civilians have also died as a result of conflict and its bloody
aftermath - but officially, no one has any idea how many.
Human rights groups
say the occupying powers have failed in a duty to catalogue the deaths,
giving the impression that ordinary Iraqis' lives are worth less than
those of soldiers.
Unofficial estimates
of the civilian toll vary wildly, from at least 10,000 to more than
37,000.
But the view famously
expressed by US General Tommy Franks that "we don't do body counts"
still resonates in government circles.
Imagine the US
not investigating exactly who died on September 11, it is unthinkable
America and Britain
say the chaos of war-torn Iraq makes it impossible to get accurate information.
And while Iraq's
health and interior ministries now record non-military deaths, resources
for this are tiny in a country rebuilding after war.
Iraq Body Count
The UK-based Iraq
Body Count - run on a shoestring by about 20 academics and peace activists
- is one of the most widely-quoted sources of information on the civilian
toll.
It says 13-15,000
ordinary Iraqis have died since the invasion in March 2003, figures
compiled from media reports of thousands of incidents.
Where
sources report differing figures, a minimum and a maximum are given.
Professor John Sloboda,
a co-founder of Iraq Body Count, told BBC News Online: "Everyone
can agree that there are good reasons why our count can never be complete,
but there is not as much confusion as you think.
"Since the
end of hostilities was declared, we are confident in the figures."
The IBC wants to
see an independent commission set up in Iraq to give the best estimate
of civilian deaths and full details of how each person died.
Prof Sloboda said:
"No country could hold its head up high without looking back to
investigate the deaths of thousands of its people.
"Imagine the
United States not investigating exactly who died on September 11, it
is unthinkable."
It should be recognised
that there is no reliable way of estimating the number of civilian casualties
caused during major combat operations
British defence
ministry
Other sources for
casualty figures include the Washington-based Brookings Institution,
which combines IBC's figures with projections for deaths caused by violent
crime in Iraq.
It says that from
May 2003 to the end of August 2004, between 10,000 and 27,000 Iraqis
were killed through acts of war or other violence.
In August, an Iraqi
group calling itself the People's Kifah said it had documented more
than 37,000 civilian deaths from March to October 2003.
But there has been
no independent scrutiny of these figures, and the group could not be
contacted.
'Precision bombing'
The Pentagon, like
the UK MoD, maintains US forces do all they can to minimise civilian
casualties in one of the "most precisely targeted campaigns"
in history, but it has said it does not produce figures on those killed.
In the chaos of
Iraq, people die, they are quickly buried and nothing more may be heard
of them. Fighters dress in street clothes... indistinguishable from
civilians
The US State Department
told BBC News Online it had no policy input on the issue, which was
"entirely a matter for the Defense Department".
An MoD spokesman
said: "It should be recognised that there is no reliable way of
estimating the number of civilian casualties caused during major combat
operations.
"We would caution
against taking the numbers quoted in media reports and else where at
face value. No source or combination of sources can produce a reliable
figure."
But in May, UK Foreign
Secretary Jack Straw told BBC radio that estimates by non-governmental
organisations put the civilian death toll at about 10,000 in the year
after the invasion. He said it was "odd that coalition forces have
not kept consistent records".
The Foreign Office
now says 10,000 was never an official figure, and doubts one will ever
be obtained.
'Weigh cost of
war'
Critics point to
the fact that neither the British nor US forces have any difficulty
in announcing they have killed a fairly exact number of "enemy"
or "insurgents".
Outcry over civilian deaths in other conflicts has shaped military policy
And some legal experts
say it is the duty of occupying powers to keep track of civilian losses
under the Geneva Conventions.
But in many incidents
it is hard to get a true picture of what caused the attack, let alone
how many people were killed.
Ken Roth, head of
Human Rights Watch, told BBC News Online he doesn't think it will ever
be possible to come up with anything better than a good guess at the
final civilian cost.
"It's not like
Yugoslavia where the Serbs kept detailed records of the civilian toll.
In Iraq, the institutions that could have compiled them have broken
down.
"In the chaos
of Iraq, people die, they are quickly buried and nothing more may be
heard of them. Fighters dress in street clothes, so in hospitals they
are indistinguishable from civilians."
Producing a final
toll can be useful in that we can weigh the cost of war against the
number of innocent lives, Mr Roth said.
"But what is
more important is what lessons can be learned by investigating how and
why people were killed."
'Decapitation strikes'
Human Rights Watch
says the invasion of Iraq saw a dramatic fall in the number of US Air
Force strikes using cluster bombs in populated areas - a consequence
of lessons learned in Afghanistan.
Nobody can stop
themselves being drawn into the blind violence that continues to sweep
the country
But it says the
US Army - which had not fought a major war for 10 years - continued
to use the controversial bombs in abundance.
A recent HRW report
also criticised what it said was the "imprecise targeting"
of decapitation strikes against figures in Saddam Hussein's regime.
Out of 50 strikes,
none were hit, says HRW, but 40 civilians were killed because planners
relied on rough Global Positioning System locations from mobile phones.
"Any attacking
force has a duty to do this kind of analysis," said Mr Roth. "What
is amazing is that the US does nothing of the sort."
In the meantime,
Iraq's precarious security situation sees dozens of people killed every
day.
"Nobody can
stop themselves being drawn into the blind violence that continues to
sweep the country," said Nada Doumani, of the International Committee
of the Red Cross.
"Civilians
are those who pay the greatest price."