"Between April 28 and July 13... at least 1,147 Iraqi civilians were killed, the AP tally shows."
Civilian Deaths in Iraq Exceed Military Associated Press | July 15, 2005
http://www.military.com/NewsContent/0,13319,FL_deaths_071505,00.html?ESRC=eb.nl
BAGHDAD, Iraq - The Iraqi government said Thursday far more civilians than soldiers or police were killed in violence over the first six months of this year. An Associated Press count found a similar trend.
Compiling casualty figures is difficult in Iraq due to the chaos of war, poor communications, weakness of Iraqi institutions and the difficulty of separating civilians from combatants in a conflict where insurgents often wear civilian clothing.
Nevertheless, the figures suggest civilians are bearing the brunt of the suffering in a conflict intended in part to bring them democracy and freedom after years of war, civil strife and economic deprivation under Saddam Hussein.
Between Jan. 1 and June 30 of this year, figures from the Ministries of the Interior and the Defense showed 275 Iraqi soldiers and 620 police were killed in bombings, assassinations or armed clashes with insurgents.
By contrast, 1,594 civilians were killed during the same period, the Ministry of Health said in response to an AP request. Government figures put the insurgent death toll for the six months at 781.
The AP tally found at least 1,786 civilians and Iraqi security forces were killed in Iraq from April 28 to July 13 - a sharp spike over previous months as insurgents ratcheted up attacks.
Between April 28 and July 13, at least 639 Iraqi security forces and at least 1,147 Iraqi civilians were killed, the AP tally shows.
Insurgents have not said they are targeting civilians, although some car bombings in Shiite Muslim cities appear to have been aimed at causing mass casualties among a community which some Islamic extremists view as heretics.
Civilians do not have bulletproof vests or armored cars, so may be killed even when attacks are aimed at police or army patrols.
The AP tally is compiled from hospital, police and military officials cited in news stories, as well as accounts from reporters and photographers at the scene of attacks. However, sometimes the bodies are taken by families directly to burial so they are not included in the count.
Police and hospital casualty counts from specific incidents often differ. Health Ministry figures, for example, are compiled from reports by government hospitals but may not include victims never taken to a clinic and buried by their families.
Additionally, communication failures prevent contact with large parts of the country, meaning some attacks may not be recorded.
In some cases, hospital staff are under pressure to over or underreport casualties for political reasons. During the March 2004 U.S. siege of Fallujah, for instance, widely inflated civilian death tolls helped generate strong public opposition, promoting the Americans to suspend the attack. The government remains highly decentralized and may not have the ability to gain accurate figures from many hospitals, especially outside Baghdad.
"I would be pretty suspicious of any statistics coming out of Iraq," Jeremy Binnie, Middle East editor for Jane's Sentinel Security Assessments, said by telephone from London.
Many civilians killed are "in areas where insurgents are most active and government control is minimal," he noted.
The issue of how many civilians have been killed in Iraq has long been both murky and contentious.
In some cases, it is difficult to tell if the victims are civilians. For instance, when 60 Iraqis killed on May 4 outside a police recruitment center, and when eight were killed May 23 outside a restaurant frequented by Iraqi police, if the victims were not specifically identified as police or soldiers, the AP included them in the civilian tally.
In June, Interior Minister Bayan Jabr told the AP in an interview that 12,000 Iraqi civilians had been killed over the past 18 months. He said the figures were obtained from an Interior Ministry research center, but other officials subsequently said they were only an estimate.
The Interior Ministry said in June that 8,175 Iraqi civilians and police officers had been killed by insurgents in the 10 months that ended May 31. But those figures did not include Iraqi soldiers nor civilians killed during U.S. military operations, according to the figures, which the ministry provided to The New York Times.
Independent and human rights groups have struggled to keep accurate statistics, mostly because of security worries that keep them from traveling in large parts of the country.
One of the most controversial efforts to count deaths, a study published in the Lancet medical journal last October, estimated that 98,000 more civilians had died in Iraq since March 2003 than would otherwise have been expected to have died. But the British government rejected those findings, which were based in part on extrapolations.
Ismael Zayer, the editor of the independent Baghdad daily al-Sabah al-Jadid, or New Day, said he believes the figures released by the Iraqi government are too low.
"We suspect that an average of 100 bodies end up in hospitals every week, none of which are counted or identified," he said.
The country's political, administrative and legal institutions simply can't keep up with the state of chaos and devise accurate counts, he said.
"These are the days of Iraq's killing fields," he said.
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