http://www.politicalaffairs.net/article/articleview/4159/1/212/Iraq: Nearly 50,000 civilians have been killed since March 2003, 3000 of whom died during August 2006. Torture is becoming increasingly widespread. Members of the Jihad, death squads and bombing by American forces are responsible for the death-toll.
Translator’s introduction: The UN is a conservative agency, operating within diplomatic channels. The death-toll in Iraq is necessarily conservative – but still shocking. In 2004, the most important British medical journal, Lancet, had already recorded more than 100,000 deaths since the American invasion of Iraq <1>, an article widely reported in the media. Perhaps we should compare this conservative UN estimate with the number of people killed during the attack on New York’s “Twin Towers”, which was the official justification by the Bush administration for the invasion of Iraq: The death toll in New York is now estimated officially at 2,823: just 5% of the deaths generated by the US invasion of Iraq.
48,994 Iraqi civilians were killed since the March 2003 American invasion and the end of August 2006. The average of 100 dead a day is increasing and torture is becoming a common practice. A new UN Report only mentioned officially-recognized deaths. And as we get closer to the fast of Ramadan, considered “the month of Redemption and of the Martyr” by members of Jihad, which starts in principle this Sunday, the Iraqis are expecting the worst. Last Saturday, 31 people, women and children included, were killed and 34 wounded by booby-trapped jerry-cans, near a gas-station in the Shia neighborhood of Sadr City in Baghdad.
From March 20 to April 9, 2003, when Baghdad fell, 4,299 civilians were killed by the joint British-American bombardments. From May to December 2003, the period which saw the beginning of the Iraqi insurrection, the number of civilians killed more than doubled, to 9,619 dead. Many were killed by Iraqi guerilla attacks.
During 2004, 12,846 civilians, mostly Shias, were killed. If some died from suicide attacks by Jihad militants, several thousand died during the battles of Najaf, Kufa and Baghdad, which pitted the US army against the Mahdi militias of the radical Shia imam Moqtada Sadr, during the summer of 2004. Numerous civilians lost their lives during the two Fallujah sieges by the American army in April 2004 and Fall of the same year. The second offensive, aimed at ejecting the Sunnites and Jihad militia out of Fallujah, was particularly vicious: more than half of the city was destroyed by aerial bombardments.
For 2005, the UN report identified 12,846 deaths. Suicide attacks were partly responsible but the US offensives north of Baghdad, in the province of Al-Anbar and along the Syrian border, created the greatest number of victims.
The death rate was high in the first six months of 2006: l5,299 deaths, more than all those killed in 2005. Worse still, during just July and August, 6,599 deaths were recorded. Although no-one was killed and no-one claimed responsibility, the February 2006 assault on the Shia Great Mosque of Samara marked a new stage in the downward spiral of the Iraq War.
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