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'25,000 civilians' killed in
Iraq
BBC News
19 July, 2005
Nearly 25,000 civilians have died violently in Iraq since the
US-led invasion in March 2003, a report says.
The dossier, based on media reports, says US-led forces were
responsible for more than a third of the deaths.
The survey was carried out by the UK-based Iraq Body Count and
Oxford Research Group - which includes academics and peace
activists.
The Iraqi government criticised their conclusions, saying
Iraqis were most at risk from terrorists who target them.
The Dossier on Civilian Casualties in Iraq 2003-2005 says 37%
of all non-combatant deaths were caused by the US-led
coalition.
Most of these occurred during the invasion phase, which it
counts as ending on 1 May 2003.
But killings by anti-occupation and criminal elements also
increased steadily over the entire two-year period.
Insurgents are said to have caused 9% of the deaths, while
post-invasion criminal violence was responsible for another
36%.
Targets
The number of civilians who have died has almost doubled in
the second year from the first, according to the report.
Almost a fifth of the 24,865 deaths were women or children and
nearly half of all the civilian deaths were reported in the
capital Baghdad.
"On average, 34 ordinary Iraqis have met violent deaths every
day since the invasion of March 2003," said John Sloboda, one of
the authors of the report.
"The ever-mounting Iraqi death toll is the forgotten cost of
the decision to go to war in Iraq," he added.
Mr Sloboda also said: "It remains a matter of the gravest
concern that, nearly two-and-a-half years on, neither the US nor
the UK governments have begun to systematically measure the
impact of their actions in terms of human lives destroyed."
Our data has been extracted from a comprehensive analysis of
over 10,000 press and media reports... Our accounting is not
complete: only an in-depth, on-the-ground census could come close
to achieving that Civilian deaths report in full.
The Iraqi government welcomed the attention the report gave to
Iraqi victims, but said it was a mistake to claim that the
"plague of terrorism" had killed fewer Iraqis than the
multinational forces.
"The international forces try to avoid civilian casualties,
whereas the terrorists target civilians and try to kill as many
of them as they can," it said in a statement.
"The root cause of Iraq's suffering is terrorism, inherited
from Saddam's fascist regime and from mistaken fundamentalist
ideology.
"Everybody knows that international forces are necessary in
Iraq, on a temporary basis and they will leave Iraq at a time
chosen by Iraqis, not in response to terrorist pressure."
'Failure'
The IBC wants to see an independent commission set up in Iraq
to give the best estimate of civilian deaths and full details of
how each person died.
Human rights groups say the occupying powers in Iraq have
failed in their duty to catalogue the deaths of civilians.
But the US and Britain say the chaos of war-torn Iraq has made
it impossible to get accurate information.
More than 1,700 US soldiers and dozens of other coalition
troops are known to have died.
The Iraqi government says 1,300 Iraqi police and military have
been killed since security forces were set up in late 2003. But
US think-tank the Brookings Institute puts the figure at almost
twice this number.
More than half of all civilian deaths were said to have been
caused by explosive devices, which disproportionately affected
children.
At least 42,500 civilians were reported to have been
injured.
The UK-based Iraq Body Count - run by academics and peace
activists - is one of the most widely-quoted sources of
information on the civilian death toll in Iraq.
The Oxford Research Group describes itself as an independent
organisation "which seeks to develop effective methods whereby
people can bring about positive change on issues of national and
international security by non-violent means".
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