Terrified US soldiers are still killing civilians with impunity, while
the dead go uncounted
By Patrick Cockburn
The Independent/UK
24 April 2005
An American patrol roared past us with the soldiers gesturing
furiously with their guns for traffic to keep back on an overpass in
central Baghdad. A black car with three young men in it did not stop
in time and a soldier fired several shots from his machine gun into
its engine.
The driver and his friends were not hit, but many Iraqis do not
survive casual encounters with US soldiers. It is very easy to be
accidentally killed in Iraq. US soldiers treat everybody as a
potential suicide bomber. If they are right they have saved their
lives and if they are wrong they face no penalty.
“We should end the immunity of US soldiers here,” says Dr Mahmoud
Othman, a veteran Kurdish politician who argues that the failure to
prosecute American soldiers who have killed civilians is one of the
reasons why the occupation became so unpopular so fast. He admits,
however, that this is extremely unlikely to happen given the US
attitude to any sanctions against its own forces.
Every Iraqi has stories of friends or relatives killed by US troops
for no adequate reason. Often they do not know if they were shot by
regular soldiers or by members of western security companies whose
burly employees, usually ex-soldiers, are everywhere in Iraq.
A member of the Iraqi National Congress, Ahmed Chalabi’s party, was
passing through an American checkpoint last year when a single shot
rang out from a sniper. No US soldier was hit, but the troops at the
checkpoint hosed down the area with fire, wounding the INC member and
killing his driver.
The rector of Al-Nahrain University in south Baghdad was travelling to
a degree ceremony on the other side of the city when white men in a
four-wheel drive suddenly opened fire, hitting him in the
stomach. Presumably they thought he was on a suicide mission.
It was obvious to many American officers from an early stage in the
conflict that the Pentagon’s claim that it did not count civilian
casualties was seen by many Iraqis as proof that the US did not care
about how many of them were killed. The failure to take Iraqi civilian
dead into account was particularly foolish in a culture where
relatives of the slain are obligated by custom to seek revenge.
The secrecy surrounding the numbers of civilians killed reveals
another important facet of the war. The White House was always more
interested in the impact of events in Iraq on the American voter than
it was in the effect on Iraqis. From the beginning of the conflict the
US and British armies had difficulty in working out who in Iraq really
was a civilian.
Marla Ruzicka, the American humanitarian worker who was buried
yesterday in California, had established in her last weeks in Iraq
that figures were kept based on after-action reports. Officially, she
found, 29 civilians were killed in fire fights between US forces and
insurgents between 28 February and 5 April. But these figures are
likely to be gross underestimates.
US soldiers are notorious in Iraq for departing immediately after a
skirmish, taking their own casualties but sometimes leaving damaged
vehicles. They would not have time to find out how many Iraqis were
killed or injured.
The Health Ministry in Baghdad did produce figures and then stopped
doing so, saying they had not been properly collated. Iraqi Body
Count, a group monitoring casualties by looking at media sources, puts
the total at 17,384. But most Iraqis die obscurely; it is dangerous
for reporters, Iraqi or foreign, to try to find out who is being
killed. Much of Iraq is a bandit-ridden no-man’s land.
Even in Baghdad it is evident from the hundreds of bodies arriving at
the mortuary that this has become one of the most violent societies on
earth. The Iraqi Body Count figure is probably much too low, because
US military tactics ensure high civilian losses – a bizarre aspect of
the war is that US commanders often do not understand the damage done
by their weapons in Iraq’s close-packed cities.
US firepower, designed to combat the Soviet army, cannot be used in
built up areas without killing or injuring civilians. Nevertheless, a
study published in the Lancet saying that 100,000 civilians have died
in Iraq appears to be too high. But the lack of definitive figures
continues to dehumanise the uncounted Iraqi dead. As Dr Richard
Garfield, a professor of nursing at Columbia University and an author
of the Lancet report, wrote: “We are still fighting to record the
Armenian genocide. Until people have names and are counted they don’t
exist in a policy sense.”
The immunity of US troops means that there is nothing to inhibit them
opening fire in what for them is a terrifying situation. For all their
modern armament they are vulnerable to suicide bombers and roadside
bombs. In the first case the attacker is already dead and in the
second the man who detonates the bomb is probably several hundred
yards away and in cover. With nobody else to shoot at it is the
civilians who pay the price.