By Sabrina Tavernise
The New York Times
15 July 2005
BAGHDAD - Iraqi civilians and police officers caught up in insurgent attacks died at a rate of more than 800 a month from August through May, according to figures released in June by the Interior Ministry.
In response to questions from The New York Times, the ministry said that 8,175 Iraqis were killed by insurgents in the 10 months that ended May 31. The ministry did not give detailed figures for the months before August 2004, nor did it provide a breakdown of the figures, which do not include either Iraqi soldiers or civilians killed during U.S. military operations.
While the figures were not reported by month, it has been clear since the government of Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari took over after the Jan. 30 election that the insurgency is taking an increasing toll, killing Iraqi civilians and security workers at an increasing rate.
In June the interior minister, Bayan Jabr, told reporters that insurgents had killed about 12,000 Iraqis since the start of the occupation - a figure that officials have emphasized is approximate. That is an average monthly toll of about 500.
The issue of civilian deaths in Iraqi has been a delicate one, with some contending that the Bush administration and the Pentagon deliberately have avoided body counts to deprive their critics of a potent argument against the war. Estimates have ranged from the 12,000 offered by Jabr to as many as 100,000 in a widely reported study last year. The new figures are likely to add to that debate.
The figures, released by e-mail through a U.S. official after multiple requests, are a significant milestone. While the Iraqi government tallies Iraqi deaths, the overall totals have been tightly guarded.
"It's an important number; it's a big deal," said Marc Garlasco, senior military analyst at Human Rights Watch in New York. "It shows the toll Iraqi civilians are paying for their freedoms."
Obtaining tallies of Iraqi dead has always been hard, in part because they have not always been compiled systematically. For some time after the 2003 invasion, the Health Ministry released daily counts cobbled together mostly from figures provided by hospitals.
But last year, when the numbers began to rise, the ministry stopped releasing those tallies publicly, just providing classified copies to the government.
Last summer, the Interior Ministry took over responsibility of tracking deaths, according to a ministry official who oversees statistics. The official, Waleed Khalil, said that before August 2004, the figures came in haphazardly on scraps of paper and that a large portion had been approximations, what he called "dark numbers."
While the Health Ministry figures covered only deaths reported by hospitals and morgues, the Interior Ministry's system is far more comprehensive, Khalil said, although he declined to be more specific.
In another set of figures provided to The New York Times, officials in the communications office of the Iraqi cabinet gave a breakdown of the deaths by Iraqi province and by gender and age. These figures, compiled by the Health Ministry and provided in an e-mail message, are far smaller than those given by the Interior Ministry because they come only from hospitals.
They show that Baghdad was the site of about 32 percent of the 3,853 deaths listed for the six months ending April 5.
The second highest number of deaths was in Anbar, a largely Sunni Arab province of about 1.2 million people that has formed the heart of the resistance to the American occupation. The third highest was in Najaf, the Shiite holy city in the south that has been the site of frequent insurgent attacks and U.S. military operations against a firebrand cleric twice last year. Children accounted for 211 of the total deaths.
In per capita terms, the highest death rates were in Anbar, Najaf and Diyala Provinces.
In all, the ministry listed 15,517 wounded in the same period. Of that figure, men made up an overwhelming majority, at 91 percent of the total. Cities in the northern Kurdish enclave were not included in the count.
Insurgent attacks claim a vast majority of Iraqi lives now. In the two months after the Shiite-led government was announced, insurgents killed more than 1,500 Iraqis, a number approaching the total of U.S. troops killed since the start of the war two years ago.
Even attacks with small death counts tear through the lives of many people. A suicide car bomb at a military checkpoint in Tikrit on June 19 killed Alaa Bahnam Shamoun, 28, who was delivering sodas and lunch with his brother, Qusay. The brothers' truck was rear-ended and, when Shamoun got out to speak with the driver, the man blew himself up. Qusay Shamoun survived, but suffered severe burns on his face and torso. He had been married just 28 days.
When Shamoun's wife saw him in a hospital in Baghdad, she barely recognized him. The family did not tell him his brother was dead, and they changed out of black mourning clothes into bright colors every time they visited him in the hospital.
"I'm still in my honeymoon and I have this," Shamoun's wife, Noha Rafail, 21, said outside his hospital room. "This is the life we have."
Deaths at the hands of Americans are statistically fewer, but far from uncommon. On June 25, a 21-year-old engineering student, Muhammad Summaidai, answered the door, according to an account by his cousin, Samir Summaidai, the Iraqi ambassador to the United Nations. A short time later he was dead, shot through the neck in what his family says was a murder by the marines.
The Marines said in a statement shortly after the incident that they were investigating.
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Citation: Sabrina Tavernise, "Iraqi death toll exceeded 800 a month, data shows," New York Times, 15 July 2005.
Original URL: http://www.iht.com/bin/print_ipub.php?file=/articles/2005/07/14/news/casualties.php
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