Survey: Over 3,000 civilians killed in Iraq war

At least 3,240 civilians died in Iraq during a month of war, including 1,896 in Baghdad, according to a five-week investigation by the Associated Press.

Other surveys have studied casualties in the capital, but the AP count is the first to try to arrive at a death toll for the whole country.

It is based on records from 60 of Iraq’s 124 hospitals – including almost all the large ones – and covers from March 20, when the war began, to April 20, when the Allies said they would soon declare major combat over.

The AP excluded all counts done by hospitals whose records did not distinguish between civilian and military dead, which means hundreds, possibly thousands, of victims in Iraq’s largest cities and most intense battles are not reflected in the total.

Even if hospital records were complete, they would not tell the full story. Many of the dead were never taken to hospitals, either buried quickly by their families or lost under rubble.

In the 1991 Gulf War, about 2,275 civilians were killed, Iraqi authorities said. No independent count is known to have been made. That war consisted of seven weeks of bombing and 100 hours of ground war, and did not take coalition forces into any Iraqi cities.

This time it was very different. And while the great majority of civilian deaths appear to have been caused by US and British attacks, witnesses say some were caused by the Iraqis themselves: by exploding Iraqi ammunition stored in residential neighbourhoods, by falling Iraqi anti-aircraft rounds aimed at Allied jets, or by Iraqi fire directed at American troops.

The US said its sophisticated weapons minimised the toll, and around the country are sites that, to look at them, bolster the claim: missiles that tore deep into government buildings but left the surrounding houses untouched.

“Did the Americans bomb civilians? Yes. But one should be realistic,” said Dr Hameed Hussein al-Aaraji, the new director of Baghdad’s al-Kindi Hospital. “Saddam ran a dirty war. He put weapons inside schools, inside mosques. What could they do?”

It will take months or more before anything like a final count emerges.

One survey is being done by the advocacy group Human Rights Watch, another by the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict, which hopes to win US compensation for victims or their relatives.

Meanwhile, from city to city, house to house, Iraqis are trying to come to terms with their losses. For most, the personal tragedy is far more important than whether the casualty count is 3,000, or double that, or more.

There is little agreement about whether being freed from Saddam’s tyranny was worth the cost in lives.

“If they didn’t want to kill civilians, why did they fire into civilian areas?” asked Ayad Jassim Ibrahim, a 32-year-old Basra fireman who said his brother Alaa was killed by shrapnel from a US missile that tore into his living room.

Al-Aaraji, at al-Kindi hospital in Baghdad, saw things differently.

“It was a war,” he said. “This is the price of liberty.”