------------------------- Via Workers World News Service Reprinted from the May 29, 2003 issue of Workers World newspaper -------------------------
THOUSANDS IN BAGHDAD ALONE: COUNTING DEAD AND WOUNDED CIVILIANS
By Leslie Feinberg
How many Iraqi civilians were killed in the war? The pro-Pentagon media in the United States are generally silent on the subject. But in Baghdad, death notices, hand-printed in yellow and white, flap in the wind from lampposts, trees and buildings.
One exception among the commercial newspapers here is the Los Angeles Times, which on May 19 reported on the findings of a survey it took of hospitals. It found that in Baghdad alone at least 1,700 civilians were confirmed dead and more than 8,000 injured.
In addition, undocumented civilian deaths in the capital and its outlying districts number at least in the hundreds and could mount to 1,000, based on reports by Islamic burial societies and groups trying to trace the missing.
U.S. military brass, governing the military occupation of Iraq, have "no plans to try to tally the civilian dead," the article stated.
Pentagon spokesperson Lt. Col. Dave Lapan brushed off the suggestion: "We have no way of verifying independently whether people who were killed were civilians or not civilians."
But, the article pointed out, "even soldiers who shed their uniforms and threw away their weapons often continued to carry some form of identification."
And, Dr. Mahmoud Kubisi explains, "Some of them would murmur to us they were soldiers, because they wanted us to be able to help find their families if they died."
Iraqi hospital personnel kept meticulous records of patient information and military affiliation. Even after the U.S. command allowed massive looting of the hospitals, staff managed to reassemble data based on notations, patient charts and morgue attendant tallies.
At Monsour Hospital in central Bagh dad, a four-hospital complex dub bed Medical City, doctors report that U.S. troops seized and removed their casualty records.
The city's registry of births and deaths wants to compile an official reckoning of war dead, but it may take months.
During the war, hospitals could not handle all the bodies of those who died. Many were buried on the grounds of the facility. Mosques helped bury bodies found in cars and buildings.
Youths, some of them 15 and 16, volunteered to help bury the decomposing bodies, "despite the extreme danger of moving about in the initial days of the American military presence," the article noted.
"They were very brave," said Hashim Qureishi, an engineer who organized a group of volunteers. "It was terrible work, though, very terrible."
Haidar Tari, in charge of tracing missing people for the Iraqi Red Crescent, estimated there may have been up to 3,000 such undocumented burials--perhaps as many as one-third of them civilian deaths.
More bodies may be found in areas under U.S. military control where the brass has barred access to the Red Crescent.
William M. Arkin, senior fellow at the Center for Strategic Education at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, said that when the final toll is registered, the number of Iraqi civilians who died in the war will probably be "many thousands." n
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