Up To 15,000
People Killed
In Invasion
By Suzanne Goldenberg
The
Guardian
30 October, 2003
As
many as 15,000 Iraqis were killed in the first days of America's invasion
and occupation of Iraq, a study produced by an independent US thinktank
said yesterday. Up to 4,300 of the dead were civilian noncombatants.
The report, by Project
on Defence Alternatives, a research institute from Cambridge, Massachussets,
offers the most comprehensive account so far of how many Iraqis died.
The toll of Iraq's
war dead covered by the report is limited to the early stages of the
war, from March 19 when American tanks crossed the Kuwaiti border, to
April 20, when US troops had consolidated their hold on Baghdad.
Researchers drew
on hospital records, official US military statistics, news reports,
and survey methodology to arrive at their figures.
They were also able
to make use of two earlier studies on Iraq's war dead from Iraq Body
Count, a website which has kept a running total of those killed, and
the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict, which has sought to count
the dead and injured of the war in order to pursue compensation claims
for their families.
The new report,
which estimates Iraq's war dead at between 10,800 and 15,100, uses a
far more rigorous definition of civilian than the other studies to arrive
at a figure of between 3,200 and 4,300 civilian noncombatants.
It breaks down the
combat deaths of up to 10,800 Iraqis who fought the American invasion.
The figures include regular Iraqi troops, as well as members of the
Ba'ath party and other militias.
The killing was
concentrated - with heavy casualties at the southern entrances of Baghdad
- but as many as 80% of the Iraqi army units survived the war relatively
unscathed, in part because troops deserted.
As many as 5,726
Iraqis were killed in the US assault on Baghdad, when the streets of
the Iraqi capital were strewn with the bodies of people trying to flee
the fighting.
As many as 3,531
- more than half - of the dead in the assault on the capital were noncombatant
civilians, according to the report.
Overall in Iraq,
the ratio of civilian to military deaths is almost twice as high as
it was in the last Gulf war in 1991. The overall toll of the first war
was far higher - with estimates of 20,000 Iraqi soldiers and 3,500 civilians
killed.
However, Operation
Iraqi Freedom, as the US military calls this year's war, has proved
far deadlier to Iraqi civilians both in absolute numbers, and in the
proportion of noncombatant to military deaths.
The findings defy
the reasoning that precision-guided weapons spare civilian lives. According
to the author of the study, Carol Conetta, 68% of the munitions used
in this war were precision-guided, compared with 6.5 % in 1991.
However, he argued
yesterday that his report demonstrated that sophisticated weaponry did
not necessarily offer protection to civilians in war zones.
"Many of the
recent wars have been fought with the notion of a new type of warfare
that produce very low civilian casualties. What we see here is that
in fact we don't have that magic bullet," he said.
"In this war
in particular we see that improved capabilities in precision attacks
have been used to pursue more ambitious objectives rather than achieve
lower numbers of civilian dead."
Counting the human
cost
Total war dead (Iraq)
Between 10,800 and
15,100, with a midpoint of 12,950
Combatants killed
(Iraq)
Between 7,600 and
10,800, with a midpoint of 9,200
Noncombatants killed
(Iraq)
Between 3,200 and
4,300, with a midpoint of 3,750
War dead (Baghdad)
Between 4,376 and
5,726, with a midpoint of 5,051
Combatants killed
(Baghdad)
Between 2,224 and
3,531, with a midpoint of 2,878
Noncombatants killed
(Baghdad)
Between 1,990 and
2,357, with a midpoint of 2,174
· Source:
Project on Defence Alternatives research