R7

"Ain't Gonna Study War No More"

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Thursday, September 09, 2004

Iraqi Children Killed in US Strikes

US forces launched new attacks yesterday in the towns of Fallujah and Tal Afar, which they say are havens for foreign militant fighters, killing at least 30 Iraqis, according to doctors.

A US military statement said the air assault was part of a "precision strike" on an operating base for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian militant Washington says is allied to Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network.

Doctors in Fallujah said at least eight people were killed and 16 wounded. Doctor Rafi Hayad said half of those killed and injured were children.

In Tal Afar, a town west of Mosul, which the US says is a haven for foreign militants crossing from Syria, doctors said at least 17 people were killed and 51 wounded in heavy fighting.

Doctors at Tal Afar's main hospital said fighting was continuing and casualties were expected to rise.

A surge in attacks and clashes in Iraq over the past few days has pushed the official US death toll for the war past 1000.

As well as trying to contain the insurgency, Iraq's government is also grappling with a hostage crisis.

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In one of the most brazen abductions so far, two Italian women aid workers and two Iraqi colleagues were snatched from their office in central Baghdad in broad daylight on Tuesday.

The captors have yet to make a statement about the kidnappings.

On Wednesday, international aid agencies met to consider withdrawing from Iraq. Jean-Dominique Bunel, a Frenchman helping to co-ordinate aid groups operating in Iraq, said he expected most of the remaining 50 foreign aid workers to pull out soon.

The latest abductions are likely to fuel uncertainty over the fate of two French journalists, Christian Chesnot and Georges Malbrunot, who have been held since August 20 despite intense diplomatic efforts to free them.

In Washington, a group of retired Pentagon officials has called on President George Bush to appoint an independent commission to investigate military abuse of prisoners in Iraq and elsewhere since the start of the global war on terror.

"We cannot ignore that there are now dozens of well-documented allegations of torture, abuse and otherwise questionable detention practices," eight former generals and admirals said of prisons in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

In-house Pentagon investigations did not require sworn testimony, do not have subpoena power and are examples of the military trying to police itself, the officers, most of whom worked in military law, said in a letter to Mr Bush.

Two of them have called for Mr Bush to be defeated in the November election. Reuters, AP

Luke Baker
Baghdad
September 10, 2004

2 Comments:

Blogger R7 said...

Despair in Iraq over the forgotten victims of US invasion

By Patrick Cockburn in Baghdad

09/08/04 "The Independent" -- Iraqi officials demanded to know yesterday why so little international attention was being given to their numerous dead as the US mourned the death of 1,000 soldiers since the invasion of Iraq.

"When I heard on television that the Americans had lost 1,000 military killed in Iraq, I asked myself, what about our side? What is the number of Iraqis who have died?" said Dr Amer al-Khuzaie, an Iraqi deputy health minister.

He admits it is impossible to know the true figure because many bodies are simply buried and the deaths never registered. "Sometimes there are as many as 200 Iraqis killed in a single day," sighed Dr Khuzaie, flicking through a file showing the casualty figures. "The Iraqi people are being eradicated. We must stop this haemorrhage, this bleeding."

The US army does not count the number of Iraqis killed since the invasion in March 2003. The most conservative figure for the number dead is 10,000 as calculated by private groups. It is rising every day. The US military claimed that on Tuesday alone it killed "100 militants" in air strikes on Fallujah on top of a further 33 people killed in fighting in Sadr City in Baghdad.

Donald Rumsfeld, the US Defence Secretary, proudly claimed on Tuesday that US forces had, last month, killed between 1,500 and 2,500 Iraqi insurgents. He did not note an ominous trend that, for the first time, more Americans were probably killed by Shia fighters than by Sunni guerrillas. For the US, it is now a war on two fronts.

Iraqis suspect that in any case many of those who died were civilians.

Dr Khuzaie admits that poor communications make it impossible to get a complete picture but he estimates that "in Najaf 400 civilians were killed and 2,500 wounded in the fighting last month."

There are many ways to die in Iraq. At the al-Khindi hospital yesterday, doctors were treating one of their own workers called Ihsan Aboud, 32, who had gone home in a taxi to Sadr City the night before. "There was a roadside bomb," explained his cousin Sabah Thigil. "It blew up as the taxi passed and two people in it were killed and Ihsan was badly burned."

Asked if the wounded man would live, a doctor gestured with his hand to show that his life was in the balance. "Even when there is nothing much happening, we get 15 to 20 people a day brought in who are victims of violence," said Dr Yassin Mustafa, an assistant manager of the hospital. "Often people do not know who shot them or blew them up."

In the close-packed heavily populated houses of Sadr City, home to two million people, the use of rockets and heavy machineguns by the US inflicts heavy casualties. The mortars of the ill-trained Mehdi Army militiamen are often misdirected. Dr Mustafa had just received seven bodies, all from a single family, hit by a mortar bomb.

He pointed out that, at this time of year, casualties were particularly severe because those in poorer neighbourhoods sleep on the roofs of their houses because it is cooler. As they lie sleeping, they are often killed or wounded by shrapnel or stray bullets.

People in Baghdad have learned caution. Often there are long traffic jams because cars do not want to go near a slowly moving American convoy, a possible target of a massive bomb buried beside the road or a rocket-propelled grenade. The Americans also have a much-feared practice of spraying fire in all directions when they come under attack.

Suicide bombers show total disregard for civilian casualties and assassins are equally careless of who they kill. On Tuesday, an attempt to kill the Governor of Baghdad Ali al-Haidri almost succeeded but a bomb hit the wrong car. A man and a women were killed by the blast. Iraq is not just a dangerous place to live because of political violence. Unicef estimated in the 1990s that 500,000 children had died because of the collapse of health standards. Infant mortality rose from 40 per 1,000 in 1990, before the 1991 Gulf War, to 108, 13 years later according to the World Health Organisation.

Public health has not improved since the invasion last year. A main reason is unclean water. Dr Bashar, a senior house surgeon at al-Kindi, said: "Look around you. Baghdad is the dirtiest city in the world."

©2004 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd. All rights reserved

8:58 PM  
Blogger R7 said...

The uncounted toll on Iraqis

The Associated Press

September 9, 2004


BAGHDAD, Iraq -- At Sheik Omar Clinic, a big book shows 10,363 violent deaths in Baghdad and nearby towns since the war began last year, deaths caused by car bombs, clashes between Iraqis and coalition forces, mortar attacks, revenge killings and robberies.

While America mourns more than 1,000 sons and daughters killed in the Iraq campaign, the Iraqi toll is far greater. No official, reliable figures exist for the whole country, but private estimates range from 10,000 to 30,000 killed since March 2003.

The violent deaths recorded in the leather ledger at the Sheik Omar Clinic come from only one of Iraq's 18 provinces and do not cover deaths in such flashpoint cities as Najaf, Karbala, Fallujah, Tikrit and Ramadi.

Iraqi dead include not only insurgents, police officers and soldiers but also civilians caught in crossfire or blown apart by explosives. They also include victims of crime, which has surged in the instability that followed the collapse of Saddam Hussein's regime.

"It is difficult to establish the right number of casualties," said Nicole Choueiry, a spokeswoman for Amnesty International, a London-based rights organization that estimates more than 10,000 Iraqi civilians died in the conflict's first year.

Iraq Body Count, a private group of British and American researchers that bases its figures in part on reports by 40 media outlets, puts the number at between 11,793 and 13,802.

Hazem al-Radini at the Human Rights Organization in Iraq, the country's oldest rights group, said it estimates the toll at more than 30,000 civilian deaths, based on reports by Iraqi news media.

Iraqi authorities have begun trying to determine overall death figures, though they face formidable problems. Insurgent groups are either reluctant to report deaths for security reasons or inflate them to win sympathy. And some Iraqi families bury their dead quickly, without reporting them.

The Iraqi Health Ministry, which began tabulating such data in April, says 2,956 civilians died across the country "as the result of a military act" between April 5 and Aug. 31.

"Our work here multiplied by at least 10 times compared to prewar periods," said Dr. Abdul-Razzak Abdul-Amir of Baghdad's coroner's office.

Meanwhile, U.S. jets pounded insurgent positions in Fallujah for a second straight day yesterday. There appeared to be no civilian deaths, the U.S. military said. Hospital officials said two people were killed but did not say if they were insurgents.

In other developments yesterday, a roadside bomb in eastern Baghdad killed one U.S. soldier and wounded two. West of Baghdad, a U.S. military helicopter crashed, but all four personnel aboard survived.

9:01 PM  

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