I guess it depends on your source as to how many civilians have been killed.
Number of Iraqi Dead May Be Unknowable
Thu Apr 10, 9:01 AM ET
By JOHN M. BRODER The New York Times
DOHA, Qatar, April 9 The effort to number the dead on the Iraqi side in the war begins with a conundrum: who is a civilian and who is a soldier?
In Basra, for example, ambulance drivers and hospital workers estimate that they have handled between 1,000 and 2,000 corpses in three weeks of war.
Some were clearly military: they wore uniforms and military boots. Others were obviously civilians: women, children and older people. Some were burned or blasted beyond recognition by bombs, artillery or grenades.
But perhaps hundreds more were men and boys of fighting age who arrived at hospitals and morgues in civilian clothes. Were they members of the Republican Guard who threw off their uniforms? Were they armed Baath party loyalists fighting for Saddam Hussein's government? Were they Fedayeen or other irregulars? If they were, could they have been trying to surrender and been killed by their own side?
The same puzzle exists across the country, more acutely and on a much larger scale in and around Baghdad. For example, relentless bombing and a week of ground combat left the Baghdad Division of Iraq's army reduced to "zero percent strength," according to Marine officers who engaged the division, once thought to number about 10,000 soldiers. Where are they?
One military official here said the number of Iraqi dead was certainly high but ultimately unknowable.
"In the bombing of the different divisions, the destruction there was terrifying," the official said, speaking on condition that he not be named. "Whole divisions were destroyed. Many went home, but many were killed. It won't be until after the war that we get a better accounting, if then."
In some incidents, there has been no doubt about the number of dead and their status as combatants or civilians. The shooting by American soldiers of a van at a checkpoint near Najaf in the first week of the war, for example, killed seven women and children. (Which I think has been proven to be a set up by Saddam) A marketplace bombing in Baghdad killed dozens of civilians, although which side was responsible is not clear.
But more broadly, the problem of sorting out and then trying to quantify the dead in this war is one that will trouble journalists, human rights groups and military historians for years.
Neither British nor American military officials will provide even rough estimates of the number of Iraqi soldiers killed in the war, although they occasionally release figures on individual engagements. The most startling such estimate came from Central Command officials on Saturday, when they said that 2,000 to 3,000 Iraqi soldiers had been killed in a three-hour sweep through part of Baghdad by a column of American armored vehicles. No evidence was offered to back the assertion.
The bombing campaign that accompanied ground actions to squeeze Iraqi military units into ever-smaller "kill boxes" almost certainly left thousands of soldiers dead, perhaps tens of thousands. But the world will probably never know how many, and no Iraqi authority is left to count them and notify their families.
The question of enemy dead does not come up in daily briefings for senior commanders at Central Command, a senior official here said. They are interested only in the combat effectiveness of the units they face and how that can be further reduced, the official said.
Nor are field commanders being asked to count the Iraqi battlefield casualties, although some, out of pride or the military impulse to quantify things, estimate casualties after battles. But at the policy level, no such estimates exist.
"We cannot look at combat as a scorecard," said Capt. Frank Thorp of the Navy, the chief military spokesman at Central Command headquarters here. "Out there in the combat environment the commander on the ground is focused on the present, the future and how his troops are doing. We are not going to ask him to make specific reports on enemy casualties."
He said that lingering on the battlefield to count the enemy dead was "too time-consuming and, frankly, too risky."
Mark Burgess, a researcher at the Center for Defense Information in Washington, a private research group, said that the war in Iraq presented unusually difficult problems in estimating the dead because few Iraqi military units fought in an organized manner. It was also hard to tell who was an enemy combatant, because many fought out of uniform and many were forced to fight by their superiors.
"It's an unanswerable question," Mr. Burgess said. "We don't know the exact number who stood and fought. There really wasn't much in the way of conventional battles."
He said the powerful munitions used by American and British air forces probably left hundreds or thousands of battlefield victims pulverized, burned or buried in rubble.
The center had been posting the official Iraqi government estimates of civilian deaths on its Web site, but dropped it today because the figures coming out of Baghdad had become "outlandish," Mr. Burgess said.
Another group, the Iraq Body Count Project, posts a daily estimate of civilian casualties culled from Arab and Western media reports. The tally today was 961 to 1,139. But officials from the group cautioned that those were only the reported deaths and that actual deaths may be much higher.
That effort also suffers from the same problem that pervades the entire enterprise of counting the Iraqi casualties. Are people working in government ministries civilians or, as the Pentagon likes to call them, "regime targets"? Is a woman suicide bomber a civilian or an enemy combatant?
The Iraqi government's figures and the estimates from the Body Count Project both suffer from "dubious methodologies," Mr. Burgess said.
"We just don't know, and we might as well just make up a number," he added.
KMAN
