Over 1,500 Violent
Civilian Deaths In Occupied Baghdad
Iraq
Body Count
08 October, 2003
The
first definitive total of violent civilian deaths in Baghdad since mid
April has been published by Iraq Body Count (IBC), an Anglo-American
research group tracking media-reported civilian deaths occuring as a
consequence of the US/UK military intervention in Iraq.
From April 14th
to 31st August, 2,846 violent deaths were recorded by the Baghdad city
morgue. When corrected for pre-war death rates in the city a total of
at least 1,519 excess violent deaths in Baghdad emerges from reports
based on the morgue's records.
IBC's latest study
is the first comprehensive count to adjust for the comparable "background
level" of deaths in Baghdad in recent pre-war times. It is therefore
an estimate of additional deaths in the city directly attributable to
the breakdown of law and order following the US takeover and occupation
of Baghdad.
The study confirms
the widespread anecdotal evidence that violence on the streets of Baghdad
has skyrocketed, with the average daily death rate almost tripling since
mid April from around 10 per day to over 28 per day during August.
Another worrying
development is that during the pre-war period deaths from gunshot wounds
accounted for approximately 10% of bodies brought to the morgue, but
now account for over 60% of those killed. The small number of reports
available for other cities indicate that these trends are being mirrored
elsewhere in the country.
Although the majority
of deaths are the result of Iraqi on Iraqi violence, some were directly
caused by US military fire. There is evidence that these deaths, often
from indiscriminate use of firepower, increasingly fail to be reported
or remain unacknowledged by occupation forces.
But responsibility for the current mayhem in Baghdad and elsewhere in
Iraq is not diffused at the bottom - at the level of ordinary soldiers
ill-suited for police-work in a hostile environment - but is concentrated
at the top, in the air-conditioned corridors of power in Washington
and London.
The Geneva Conventions
and Hague Regulations, to which the US and UK are signatories, place
the responsibility for ensuring public order and protecting the civilian
population from violence on the occupying powers. UN Resolution 1483,
which recognized the US/UK as the de facto occupying authority in Iraq,
clearly bound them to these duties. But the US/UK are manifestly failing
to fulfil them, compounding the death and destruction already unleashed
by their invasion of Iraq. At the same time the US, in particular, resists
any multilateral initiatives which would lead to an early end to its
dominance over the country.
Meanwhile the latest
reports from the nation's capital show that, as throughout the summer,
the city's daily death toll continues to rise.
IBC researcher Hamit
Dardagan said "The US may be effective at waging war but the descent
of Iraq's capital city into lawlessness under US occupation shows that
it is incompetent at maintaining public order and providing security
for the civilian population. The US has toppled Saddam and discovered
that it won't be discovering any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
So why is it still there? And if the US military can't ensure the safety
of Iraqi civilians and itself poses a danger to them, what is its role
in that country?
"It is high
time for the occupying authority to take serious steps towards an orderly
hand-over of power and jurisdiction to Iraqis instead of making them
junior partners in running their own country, and for the US/UK to stop
requiring the international community to act as nothing more than a
fig-leaf for US control of Iraq.
"Until they
do, ordinary Iraqis may justifiably feel ungrateful for a 'liberation'
that has removed the fear of Saddam but left them under military occupation
and living in terror of their own streets."