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October 11th, 2006 - 2,660 Iraqi
Civilians Killed in Sept. News article by the Associated Press |
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2,660 Iraqi Civilians Killed
in Sept. By Qassim Abdul-Zahra and Lee Keath Associated Press Oct 11, 2006 12:39 PM ET More than 2,660 Iraqi
civilians were killed in the capital in September amid a wave of sectarian
killings and insurgent attacks, an increase of 400 over the month before,
according to figures from the Iraqi Health Ministry. The increase came despite an
intensified U.S.-Iraqi sweep of Baghdad that was launched in mid-August to
try to put down the wave of violence that has swept over the capital. The
violence consists of a deadly combination of bombings and shootings by Sunni
insurgents, and slayings by Shiite and Sunni death squads. The September numbers come
as a controversial new study contends that nearly 655,000 Iraqis have died in
the three-year-old conflict in Iraq - more than 10 times higher than other
independent estimates of the toll. President Bush dismissed as
"just not credible" the study's estimate study that contends nearly
655,000 Iraqis have died because of the war. Bush, who in the past has
suggested 30,000 civilian deaths in Iraq, would not give a figure for overall
fatalities. "A lot of innocent people have lost their life," he
said at a news conference in Washington. The study, which is to be
published Thursday on the Web site of The Lancet, a medical journal, was
based on a survey of households in Iraq, not a body count, and quickly raised
skepticism among some Iraq experts. Pentagon spokesman Bryan
Whitman said it was difficult "with any certainty" to estimate the
number of Iraqi civilians who have died, and said the department does
everything possible to prevent civilian casualties. "We take great
precautions in our military operations," he said. "That's in stark
contrast to what the enemy in Iraq is doing. They take no such precautions.
In fact, they deliberately target innocent civilians in their attacks." An accurate count of total
Iraqi deaths since the war's start has been difficult to obtain. According to
an Associated Press tally, at least 13,414 Iraqis have been killed in
war-related violence through Tuesday since the new government took office on
April 28, 2005. Of those, 9,300 were civilians. The AP tally is compiled
from hospital, police and military officials cited in news stories, as well
as accounts from reporters and photographers at the scenes. The actual number
is likely higher as many killings go unreported or uncounted. A private group called Iraqi
Body Count says it has recorded about 44,000 to 49,000 civilian Iraqi deaths.
But it notes that those totals are based on media reports, which it says
probably overlook "many if not most civilian casualties." The figures for the number
of civilian deaths in September in Baghdad came in an official monthly report
from the Health Ministry to the Cabinet on the number of Baghdad victims of
violent deaths, two senior ministry officials told The Associated Press. The two officials spoke on
condition of anonymity because the government has issued orders that the
death figures not be released. Civilian casualty numbers are always
sensitive, and several other officials in the Health and Interior ministries
contacted by the AP refused to give statistics. The report said 2,667
civilians had died violent deaths in September - an average of 89 a day.
Those deaths include bodies found dumped around Baghdad and the victims of
explosions, shootings and other attacks, the two officials said. By comparison, 2,222 people
died violently in August in Baghdad, according to a U.N. report published in
September, which is also based on official statistics from the Health
Ministry. The two ministry officials
said the U.N. number was accurate for the August deaths. The monthly figures include
two categories. One is the number of bodies found in Baghdad, provided from
the city morgue, where the bodies are taken to determine the cause of death. In September, the morgue
reported 1,471 bodies of people who died from violence. Shiite and Sunni death squads
are known to kidnap members of the opposing sect, then dump bodies of their
victims, often bound and tortured. So a large proportion of the 1,471 bodies
are likely from sectarian killings - though they also would include victims
of criminal kidnappings and murders. The other category included
in the monthly figure encompasses the victims of explosions, shootings or
other attacks, reported by hospitals. They numbered 1,196 in September,
according to the report, the two Health Ministry officials said. In August, 1,536 bodies were
brought to the morgue, according to the U.N. report. The past summer has seen a
startling increase in bloodshed, centered in the capital, after the wave of
sectarian violence was sparked by the February bombing of a Shiite shrine in
the city of Samarra, north of Baghdad. The deadliest month was
July, when 3,590 people were killed across the country - 2,884 of them in
Baghdad, according to the U.N. The number killed countrywide fell in August
to 3,009, the U.N. said. The Health Ministry
officials who spoke to the AP did not have September figures for the entire
country, only for Baghdad. Associated Press Writer
Malcolm Ritter in New York contributed to this report. Copyright © 2006 The
Associated Press. All rights reserved. External link:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061011/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraqi_death_toll Iraqi
Dead May Total 600,000, Study Says By Sabrina Tavernise and Donald G. McNeil Jr. New York Times October 11, 2006 Baghdad,
Oct. 10 - A team of American and Iraqi public health researchers has
estimated that 600,000 civilians have died in violence across Iraq since the
2003 American invasion, the highest estimate ever for the toll of the war
here. The
figure breaks down to about 15,000 violent deaths a month, a number that is
quadruple the one for July given by Iraqi government hospitals and the morgue
in Baghdad and published last month in a United Nations report in Iraq. That
month was the highest for Iraqi civilian deaths since the American invasion. But
it is an estimate and not a precise count, and researchers acknowledged a
margin of error that ranged from 426,369 to 793,663 deaths. It
is the second study by researchers from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of
Public Health. It uses samples of casualties from Iraqi households to
extrapolate an overall figure of 601,027 Iraqis dead from violence between
March 2003 and July 2006. The
findings of the previous study, published in The Lancet, a British medical
journal, in 2004, had been criticized as high, in part because of its
relatively narrow sampling of about 1,000 families, and because it carried a
large margin of error. The
new study is more representative, its researchers said, and the sampling is
broader: it surveyed 1,849 Iraqi families in 47 different neighborhoods
across Iraq. The selection of geographical areas in 18 regions across Iraq
was based on population size, not on the level of violence, they said. The
study comes at a sensitive time for the Iraqi government, which is under
pressure from American officials to take action against militias driving the
sectarian killings. In
the last week of September, the government barred the central morgue in Baghdad
and the Health Ministry - the two main sources of information for civilian
deaths - from releasing figures to the news media. Now, only the government
is allowed to release figures. It has not provided statistics for September,
though a spokesman said Tuesday that it would. The
American military has disputed the Iraqi figures, saying that they are far
higher than the actual number of deaths from the insurgency and sectarian
violence, in part because they include natural deaths and deaths from
ordinary crime, like domestic violence. But
the military has not released figures of its own, giving only percentage
comparisons. For example, it cited a 46 percent drop in the murder rate in
Baghdad in August from July as evidence of the success of its recent sweeps.
At a briefing on Monday, the military’s spokesman declined to characterize
the change for September. The
military has released rough counts of average numbers of Iraqis killed and
wounded in a quarterly accounting report mandated by Congress. In the report,
“Measuring Stability and Security in Iraq,” daily averages of dead and
wounded Iraqi civilians, soldiers and police officers rose from 26 a day in
2004 to almost 120 a day in August 2006. The
study uses a method similar to that employed in estimates of casualty figures
in other conflict areas like Darfur and Congo. It sought to measure the
number of deaths that occurred as a result of the war. It
argues that absolute numbers of dead, like morgue figures, could not give a
full picture of the “burden of conflict on an entire population,” because
they were often incomplete. The
mortality rate before the American invasion was about 5.5 people per 1,000
per year, the study found. That rate rose to 19.8 deaths per 1,000 people in
the year ending in June. Gunshots
were the largest cause of death, the study said, at 56 percent of all violent
deaths, while car bombs accounted for about 13 percent. Deaths caused by the
American military declined as an overall percentage from March 2003 to June
2006. Violent
deaths have soared since the American invasion, but the rise is in part a
matter of spotty statistical history. Under Saddam Hussein, the state had a
monopoly on killing, and the deaths of thousands of Iraqi Shiites and Kurds
that it caused were never counted. While
the near collapse of the Iraqi state makes precise record-keeping difficult,
authorities have made considerable progress toward tracking death figures. In
2004, when the Johns Hopkins study was first released, authorities were still
compiling deaths on an ad hoc basis. But by this year, they were being
provided regularly. Iraqi
authorities say morgue counts are more accurate than is generally thought.
Iraqis prefer to bury their dead immediately, and hurry bodies of loved ones
to plots near mosques or, in the case of Shiites, in sacred burial sites.
Even so, they have strong incentives to register the death with a central
morgue or hospital in order to obtain a death certificate, required at
highway checkpoints, by cemetery workers, and for government pensions. Death
certificates are counted in the statistics kept by morgues around the
country. The
most recent United Nations figure, 3,009 Iraqis killed in violence across the
country in August, was compiled by statistics from Baghdad’s central morgue,
and from hospitals and morgues countrywide. It assumes a daily rate of about
97. The
figure is not exhaustive. A police official at Yarmouk Hospital in Baghdad
who spoke on the condition of anonymity said he had seen nationwide counts
provided to the hospital that indicated as many as 200 people a day were
dying. Gilbert
Burnham, the principle author of the study, said the figures showed an
increase of deaths over time that was similar to that of another civilian
casualty project, Iraq Body Count, which collates deaths reported in the news
media, and even to that of the military. But even Iraq Body Count puts the
maximum number of deaths at just short of 49,000. As
far as skepticism about the death count, he said that counts made by
journalists and others focused disproportionately on Baghdad, and that death
rates were higher elsewhere. “We
found deaths all over the country,” he said. Baghdad was an area of medium
violence in the country, he said. The provinces of Diyala and Salahuddin,
north of Baghdad, and Anbar to the west, all had higher death rates than the
capital. Statistics
experts in the United States who were able to review the study said the
methods used by the interviewers looked legitimate. Robert
Blendon, director of the Harvard Program on Public Opinion and Health and
Social Policy, said interviewing urban dwellers chosen at random was “the
best of what you can expect in a war zone.” But
he said the number of deaths in the families interviewed - 547 in the
post-invasion period versus 82 in a similar period before the invasion - was
too few to extrapolate up to more than 600,000 deaths across the country. Donald
Berry, chairman of biostatistics at M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston,
was even more troubled by the study, which he said had “a tone of accuracy
that’s just inappropriate.” Sabrina
Tavernise reported from Baghdad, and Donald G. McNeil Jr. from New York. External link:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/11/world/middleeast/11casualties.html |