Body
Counts
By Jonathan Steele
The Guardian
28 May , 2003
All over Baghdad on walls
of mosques or outside private homes, pieces of black cloth inscribed
with yellow lettering bear witness to the thousands of Iraqis killed
in the American-led war. Only if they were officers do these notices
make clear whether the victims were soldiers or civilians. As far as
Iraqis are concerned all the dead are "martyrs", whether they
fell defending their country or were struck when missiles or cluster
bombs hit their homes.
Iraqis argue that in a war launched against their country illegally,
every casualty is an innocent who deserves equal mourning. Yet the few
western newspapers and human rights groups which have begun to calculate
the war's death toll focus on civilians.
The website - www.iraqbodycount.net
- calculates the civilian toll as between 5,425 and 7,041. A Los Angeles
Times survey of 27 hospital records in Baghdad and its outlying districts
found that 1,700 civilians died in this area.
The bias in these counts
may be influenced by the trend of wars in the Balkans, Chechnya and
Africa, where civilians were at greatest risk. Evidence from Iraq suggests
this war was different.
The Los Angeles Times itself
contacted four mosque-based burial societies which reported interring
600 bodies of civilians, and many more of soldiers. Haidar Tari, director
of tracing missing persons for the Iraqi Red Crescent, estimated up
to 3,000 such undocumented burials, perhaps two-thirds involving soldiers.
Interviews I did with officers
and soldiers in Baghdad also suggest the military death toll exceeded
the civilian. The imbalance was not as marked as in the first Gulf war
when around 3,500 Iraqi civilians were killed, compared with 100,000
soldiers.
In this war no more than
10% died in most units. The resistance American and British forces met
as they advanced into Iraq was mainly confined to the first week. After
that men ran away in huge numbers.
Lt Col Adel Abdul Jabar commanded
an air defence unit on the eastern approach to Baghdad. "We had
250 men moving about in the area manning 57mm anti-aircraft guns. American
planes were hitting us day and night. We shot down some cruise missiles
and morale initially was high," he recalls.
After a missile scored a
direct hit on an underground bunker killing four soldiers on March 24,
three days into the war, many deserted. "We were down to 175 men
out of 250 after a week," he says. On April 4 a cluster bomb landed
on part of the air defence force at Doura. "It really frightened
the men. A captain, a first lieutenant, and 19 soldiers were killed
or wounded. You could not approach the injured because of the unexploded
bombs lying on the ground. The wounded were dying where they were."
The shock caused a new exodus.
By April 9 the unit only had 13 officers and one soldier, wounded in
the arm. More than 80% had fled. Twenty-five, exactly 10%, had died.
Stationed at the al-Taji
airbase north of Baghdad, Private Abbas Ali Hussein was a private in
an artillery unit. He and 200 others were ordered to move to the capital's
western outskirts as the Americans approached. Half slipped off on the
way or deserted in the first days.
On April 5 US planes attacked.
"Seven of our 18 guns were hit in one hour," says Hussein.
"They were in civilian areas on the main road. The others were
quickly moved under palm trees. Between seven and 10 of us were killed.
Others ran. I experienced bombing as a child but had never been near
anything like this. It was terrible."
Two of his close friends
had died and he felt he could not abandon his post. "I thought
I had to carry on to avenge them," he says. Military honour also
played a role, plus the fact that his father was a retired army officer
and a member of the Ba'ath party. By April 8, when US forces were in
Baghdad, he and five others were the only ones left from the unit of
200. Like many other Baghdad soldiers, Private Hussein used to go home
during the war for food and clean clothes. The army supplied nothing.
Desertions in his unit were at 90%. Around 5% were killed.
One of the biggest battles
took place at Baghdad airport. Adel Ali, 29, was with 950 airforce troops
guarding the perimeter. There were 1,000 infantry and another 1,000
Republican guards outside the airfield. After US land forces reached
it on April 5, he estimates that about a hundred Iraqis died. The death
toll was 3%.
To try to stop desertions,
soldiers had to sign a declaration saying they understood they would
be executed. In practice, no interviewee knew of such cases. Mass desertions
affected every unit including the Special Republican Guards, who experts
predicted would mount the fiercest resistance. Many were members of
Saddam Hussein's tribe in Tikrit. In fact, they abandoned Tikrit even
before Baghdad fell.
Before the war, thinktanks
estimated that the Iraqi military had 389,000 men, including 80,000
members of the Republican Guard. Iraq was also believed to have up to
60,000 paramilitaries and 650,000 reservists, though how many of the
latter answered the call is unclear.
Extrapolating from the death-rates
of between 3% and 10% found in the units around Baghdad, one reaches
a toll of between 13,500 and 45,000 dead among troops and paramilitaries.
The heaviest fighting took place around Baghdad and in a few places
on the route from the south. The overall casualty rate may lie closer
to the lower figure.
Postwar calculations are
rough, but they are all there is since Iraqi officials kept no tally.
The US also avoided the issue. "We don't do body counts",
said General Tommy Franks, the US commander.
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