|
The War Profiteers - War Crimes,
Kidnappings & Torture |
|
April 16th,
2009 - Iraq Air Raids Hit Mostly Women and Children |
|
Iraq Air Raids
Hit Mostly Women and Children Report urges review of military strategy when targeting urban areas By Kim Sengupta The Independent April 16, 2009 Air strikes and artillery
barrages have taken a heavy toll among the most vulnerable of the Iraqi
people, with children and women forming a disproportionate number of the
dead. Analysis carried out for the
research group Iraq Body Count (IBC) found that 39 per cent of those killed
in air raids by the US-led coalition were children and 46 per cent were
women. Fatalities caused by mortars, used by American and Iraqi government
forces as well as insurgents, were 42 per cent children and 44 per cent
women. Twelve per cent of those
killed by suicide bombings, mainly the tool of militant Sunni groups, were
children and 16 per cent were females. One in five (21 per cent) of those
killed by car bombs, used by both Shia and Sunni fighters, was a child; one
in four (28 per cent) was a woman. The figures, compiled by
academics at King’s College and Royal Holloway, University of London, show
that hi-tech weaponry has caused lethal damage to those in the population who
would be furthest away from the conflict. The victims of one of the
most brutal and common types of killings in the war – abduction and execution
by death squad – were 95 per cent men, many of them bearing marks of torture. The report, The Weapons That
Kill Civilians, Deaths of Children and Noncombatants in Iraq, was compiled
from a sample of 60,481 deaths in 14,196 events over a five-year period since
the 2003 invasion. Civilian casualties from concentrated bouts of violence,
such as the two sieges of Fallujah, were excluded. IBC estimates that the total
deaths in the conflict so far number 99,774. The medical journal The Lancet
has maintained in another study that more than 600,000 people were killed in
the first three years of the war. IBC holds that the indiscriminate nature of
the fatalities caused by air strikes shows they should not be used in urban
areas. Growing anger over civilian
casualties caused by air raids in another front of the “war on terror”,
Afghanistan, has led to the US, UK and their Nato partners reviewing their
policy of using warplanes. Hamid Karzai, the Afghan President, recently said
this had become the most contentious issue between him and Western powers. From 2004 to 2007, the
overall tonnage of munition dropped from planes in the Afghan conflict rose
from 163 tonnes a year to 1,956 tonnes, an increase of 1,100 per cent. Since
2001 the US air force has dropped 14,049 tonnes of bombs in Afghanistan and
18,858 in Iraq. Professor John Sloboda, of
Royal Holloway, co-author of the report, said: “Our weapon-specific findings
have implications for a wide range of conflicts, because the patterns found
in this study are likely to be replicated for these weapons whenever they are
used. External link: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/iraq-air-raids-hit-mostly-women-and-children-1669282.html |