SURVEYS POINTING TO HIGH CIVILIAN DEATH TOLL IN IRAQ
LindaTaylor
http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0522/p01s02-woiq.html
BAGHDAD - Evidence is mounting to suggest that between 5,000 and 10,000
Iraqi civilians may have died during the recent war, according to
researchers involved in independent surveys of the country.
None of the local and foreign researchers were willing to speak for the
record, however, until their tallies are complete.
Such a range would make the Iraq war the deadliest campaign for
noncombatants that US forces have fought since Vietnam.
Though it is still too early for anything like a definitive estimate, the
surveyors warn, preliminary reports from hospitals, morgues, mosques, and
homes point to a level of civilian casualties far exceeding the Gulf War,
when 3,500 civilians are thought to have died.
"Thousands are dead, thousands are missing, thousands are captured," says
Haidar Taie, head of the tracing department for the Iraqi Red
Crescent in Baghdad. "It is a big disaster."
US and British military officials insisted throughout the war that their
forces did all they could to avoid civilian casualties. But it has become
clear since the fighting ended that bombs did go astray, that targets were
chosen in error, and that as US troops pushed rapidly north toward the
capital they killed thousands of civilians from the air and from the ground.
"During the war, some people brought bodies to the hospitals to get death
certificates; others just buried them where they were found in the street,
or in schools," adds Faik Amin Bakr, director of the Baghdad morgue. "I
don't think anyone in Iraq could give you the figure of civilian deaths at
the moment."