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in September
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Featuring Essays by:
Edward Said, Robert Fisk, Michael Neumann, Shahid Alam, Alexander
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Recent
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August
7, 2003
M.
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|
August
7, 2003
CounterPunch
Exclusive
Adding Indifference
to Injury
At
Least 20,000 Civilians Injured in Iraq War
By Hamit Dardagan,
John Sloboda and Kay Williams
Iraq
Body Count Project
Extraction of media-reported civilian injuries
from the Iraq Body Count database and archive of war reports
provides evidence of at least 20,000 civilian injuries on top
of the maximum reported 7798 deaths. 8,000 of these injuries
were in the Baghdad area alone, suggesting that the full, countrywide
picture, as with deaths, is yet to emerge.
The Iraq
Body Count Project has never published a running total of
injuries suffered in the war because injuries encompass a scale
from the grievous and incapacitating to the light and fully recuperable,
and in the absence of information about severity it makes no
sense to assign the same unit value to each report of injury.
But because injuries are not all comparable does not mean that
they can or should be excluded from an accounting of the human
costs of the war. On the contrary, the need to investigate and
assess them is especially urgent, for many of the injured may
still be suffering and their condition may be improved if we
act promptly.
The protagonists of the war have repeatedly
claimed an inability to provide accurate estimates of civilian
deaths. Insofar as some casualties may have been burned beyond
recognition, pulverised into dust or buried quickly according
to Islamic custom and never officially recorded, there is indeed
a possibility that not every death can be accounted for. Injuries
are another matter. The injured are alive, perhaps receiving
treatment, and the cause, nature and extent of their injuries
will appear in medical, official, and informal records.
What follows is Iraq Body Count (IBC)'s
attempt to provide an overview of the scale of the problem that
needs to be tackled more directly by those who have the means
to do so. First we analyse what the IBC data-base can tell us
about civilian injuries in Iraq, and include various accounts
of injuries suffered during the course of the war to illustrate
our general conclusions. We then discuss the potential costs
of compensation, and argue that the occupying powers have a moral
and humanitarian imperative to meet those costs. It is our hope
that they do not entirely lack the will to do so--or if they
do, that their citizenry will help them to find it.
Data are derived from
over 300 press reports
IBC archivist Kay Williams has undertaken
a content-analysis of over 300 published reports used to establish
the 150 entries in the IBC data-base of civilian deaths to July
6 2003. Every mention of injuries in these reports has been extracted
and tabulated. In IBC terminology, each line in the on-line data-base
is referred to as an incident, even though some entries cover
multiple incidents within a locality.
There is evidence that the "precision"
or highly-targeted bombing of Baghdad in the early days of the
conflict may have injured far more people than were killed. Conversely,
deaths in the ground war, particularly when civilian cars were
fired on by heavy machine guns or tanks, may have seen the ratios
reversed, with few escaping alive from the blazing wrecks. However,
taken across all phases and arenas of the war, injuries were
probably about 3 times more numerous than deaths.
Press and media reports for 43 IBC incidents
do not mention any injuries. It cannot be inferred from this
that no injuries occurred, simply that the journalists or reporters
concerned either had no access to information about injuries,
or were concentrating simply on deaths.
Civilian injuries were mentioned in the
press and media reports for 107 incidents. The total maximum
reported injuries across all 107 incidents is 19,733. [1] This
takes account of known double counting across different incidents
using much the same methodology as has been applied to reports
of deaths in the IBC database. This total should NOT however
be considered comprehensive, and is most likely an under-estimate
because:
* Our data-base includes only stories
which include reports of civilian deaths. Stories reporting injuries
but no deaths are not included in our data-base.
* The present calculations include only
media and NGO reports published up to July 6, and in particular
do not include UNICEF's July 17 report [2] of more than 1,000
children injured since the end of the war by unexploded ordnance;
* The injured may, and likely will, have
been under-reported during the war, for reasons including their
more rapid removal (for treatment) from the scene of incidents.
These limitations should be borne in
mind and the present study considered a "first count",
not a final or complete accounting, of the war's civilian wounded.
3 times as many injuries
as deaths have been reported
An informative statistic for analysing
and evaluating injuries is the RATIO of injuries to deaths for
a given incident. This ratio can be calculated by dividing the
maximum estimate of injuries by the maximum estimate of deaths.
If there are equal numbers of injuries to deaths, then this ratio
is 1.0. If there are twice as many injuries as deaths, this ratio
is 2.0. If there are twice as many deaths as injuries, this ratio
is 0.5.
18 of the 107 incidents had a injury-to-death
ratio of less than 1.0, and 7 incidents had a ratio of exactly
1.0. The remaining 82 incidents had an injury-to-death ratio
of greater than 1, with a maximum ratio of 69. This maximum ratio
was provided by 207 reported injuries and 3 reported deaths during
massive aerial bombardment of Baghdad on the night of 21-22 March
(IBC incident x009). Although the reports of injuries were provided
by Iraqi government sources, independent estimates from the Red
Cross confirmed at least 100 injuries, which still represents
a massive injury-death ratio of 33. This lends some support to
the claims that parts of the air-war (particularly in and around
Baghdad) were conducted using precision-guided munitions, where
there were few deaths but many injuries from falling and flying
masonry, shrapnel etc. Most of the larger ratios were indeed
the result of aerial bombardment, relatively early in the campaign.
The smaller ratios typically come from the later ground war and
"post-war" conflict.
If one wished to answer the question
"what is a typical, or average" ratio of injuries to
deaths, there are two statistical averaging procedures which
might be used. One is the mean ratio (the mean is the sum of
all ratios divided by the number of incidents from which ratios
could be calculated). The mean injury-death ratio is 5.0 (in
other words, 5 injuries per death).
A second averaging procedure is the median
ratio. This is found by setting out all 107 ratios in ascending
order, and picking the ratio which occurs at the 54th position
(i.e. in the middle of the series). The median injury-death ratio
is 2.85 (in other words, around three injuries per death).
Often the mean and the median of a set
of scores are quite close to one another. The mean tends to differ
from the median when the distribution is statistically skewed.
The distribution of injury-death ratios in the IBC data base
is indeed skewed, with a small number of incidents having very
high injury-death ratios, which are not typical of the larger
number of incidents. Only 23 of the incidents have an injury-death
ratio of greater than 6, with the majority of these being below
10. However the "top" 10 incidents have injury-death
ratios, in ascending order, of 10.2, 13.1, 13.9, 16.2 16.6, 17.8,
20, 24, 45, and 69. These few incidents skew the mean upwards.
In our view, the more "typical"
estimate is given by the median. This would suggest that, on
average, in a typical incident in this war, there were about
3 injuries for every death. Multiplying the 7711 maximum reported
deaths (up to July 7th, 2003) by the median of 2.85 provides
a figure of 21,976, which might be considered a more accurate
estimate of injuries that takes into account the 43 database
entries for which injuries were not reported and other data absent
from the IBC database, as noted earlier.
Many of the reports of injuries are simply
anonymous numbers. But Western journalists were sometimes able
to get close to the field of battle and report their encounters
with the wounded.
Heartbreaking details
Some of the most horrific scenes followed
coalition air raids in and around Hillah, where, in the first
days of April, the Red Cross reported dozens of civilians killed
and more than 450 wounded by aerial bombardment, including by
suspected cluster bombs. [3]
Robert Fisk was among the Western journalists
to visit the local hospital and report on the aftermath:
"Heartbreaking is the only word
to describe 10-year-old Maryam Nasr and her five-year-old sister
Hoda. Maryam has a patch over her right eye where a piece of
bomblet embedded itself. She also had wounds to the stomach and
thighs. I didn't realise that Hoda, standing by her sister's
bed, was wounded until her mother carefully lifted the little
girl's scarf and long hair to show a deep puncture in the right
side of her head, just above her ear, congealed blood sticking
to her hair but the wound still gently bleeding. Their mother
described how she had been inside her home and heard an explosion
and found her daughters lying in their own blood near the door.
The little girls alternately smiled and hid when I took their
pictures. In other wards, the hideously wounded would try to
laugh, to show their bravery. It was a humbling experience."
[4]
Futher injuries are, of course, being
sustained after the cessation of bombing, by unexploded munitions,
many fired by US or UK forces:
"Karbala is typical. At al-Hussein
hospital, 35 bodies have been brought in since the city fell
April 6, many dismembered by a cluster-bomblet blast, according
to chief surgeon Ali Iziz Ali. An additional 50 have been treated
for fractures and deep, narrow puncture wounds, typical of the
weapons. Karbala civil-defense chief Abdul Kareem Mussan says
his men are harvesting about 1,000 cluster bombs a day in places
Myers said were not targets." [5]
UNICEF has recently reported that more
than 1,000 children have been injured by unexploded ordnance
since the end of the war, including by cluster bombs (and now
unguarded) Iraqi munitions, and emphasized that "the coalition
forces have a clear obligation under humanitarian law to remove
these dangers from communities." [2]
Despite "major hostilities"
having been declared over, Iraqi civilians are still regularly
being shot and injured by American and British troops. This incident
in Majar-al-Kabir is just one of literally scores of similar
incidents all over Iraq, notable only in that this time British
troops were involved:
"Most agree that a local man, possibly
a former Ba'ath party official, started shooting with a handgun.
The British then opened fire. 'It was about 10.15 and the market
was very crowded,' said Mr Younis. 'I threw myself on the ground
and shouted to everybody to run away or get down. The shooting
lasted for about five minutes but there were bullets going everywhere.
They were firing on automatic.' .At least 17 people were hit.
They included a 13-year-old girl caught by a ricochet in the
shoulder and a nine-year-old boy. Several other casualties have
spinal injuries and multiple fractures. In all, five men died
from their wounds. As the wounded lay in the bazaar the British
soldiers drove away." [6]
And sometimes, like these descriptive
on-the-scene reports, even anonymous statistics provide shocking
glimpses of the war's toll of pain, horror and long-term suffering:
The Red Cross reported from Baghdad that
during its heaviest fighting the city's hospitals were so overwhelmed
by admissions that no one could any longer keep an accurate count,
but that one major hospital alone had been admitting the war-wounded
at a rate of about 100 patients an hour. [7] And in one of the
most heart-rending of statistics, another aid organization reported
just a month into the war that a hospital, situated in one of
the poorest parts of Baghdad, "had amputated more than 100
limbs of children in that one month." [8]
When will the injured
see justice?
A sizeable if as yet unknown proportion
of Iraqi families will contain a relative whose life was ended
or put on hold by the US or British forces. Even if only in self-interest,
the US and UK administrations should be putting the needs of
the injured at the very heart of its strategy to "win hearts
and minds". Instead, along with deaths, the maimed civilians
of Iraq have been brushed under the carpet, with the exception
of a few recipients of "high-profile" rescues (such
as the air-lifting to Kuwait of Ali Abbas who lost all his family
and both of his arms, recorded in IBC incident x025--Baghdad,
March 30).
MASH units, too, provided immediate help
to some Iraqi civilians wounded in the fighting, although it
would appear that this was dependent upon the goodwill and resources
of commanding officers--and likely to be withdrawn when it conflicted
with their primary function. [9,10] Iraq's own hospitals, run-down
and neglected for years under the sanctions regime, have suffered
looting, vandalism, loss of electrical power, the deaths of staff
and even (in at least three of them [11]) direct bombardment,
all attributable to the war. But however heroic the efforts of
their staff, there is no denying that the country's health system
is now in a desperate state.
To our knowledge, no US or UK government-directed
programme is specifically targeted towards the injured civilians
of Iraq: the men, women, children and old people maimed and traumatised
by the brutality of military intervention, and no government-directed
report is available on the progress, if any, that has been made
to assess and address the serious humanitarian and health issues
arising from war injuries. It has been left to a few charities
and aid-agencies, which have struggled against US obstruction
to gain a foothold for their work with the sick and injured.
The United Nations has remained ineffectual, firmly kept in the
background by US diktat.
It is the most basic of principles that
those who cause damage, harm and injury are responsible for repairing
these and making amends if they have the power to do so. "But
U.S officials," the Washington Post reported in late May,
"have made clear to Iraqis that they do not intend to conduct
a complete accounting of war damages, nor compensate those who
say the occupying army owes them." [12]
Dina Sarhan, 21, who lost a leg to US
shrapnel, sought no more than a prosthetic leg from the occupying
power, only to be repeatedly turned down because it was "up
to a higher authority." One of "thousands who incarnate
the collateral damage of [the] war," she is unable to climb
the stairs in her house and is "learning to make do"
by sleeping in the dining room. She says she has forgiven the
anonymous soldiers who injured her, but recognizes all too clearly
the gap between the rhetoric and reality of modern warfare: "Mr.
Bush said this would be a clean war. Is this a clean war?"
Unfortunately the "higher authorities"
have their minds on other matters. "While sympathetic to
individual hardships suffered as a result of war, U.S. officials
say they are wary of beginning a legal process that could entail
millions of claims against them" (when material damages
as well as physical injuries are included); they also fret over
"the endemic fraud that would creep into this."
But those, surely, are risks the US brought
upon itself.
And instead of facing up to its responsibilities,
the Pentagon is already ducking them--by restraining those of
its more enlightened on-the-ground commanders who have acted
in recognition of the strength of war of victims' claims. In
a recent briefing US military leaders explicitly ruled out any
compensation for injuries (or deaths) sustained during the combat
period prior to May 1st. Families will only be eligible for compensation
if they can "prove clear-cut negligence or wrongdoing by
soldiers" in the "post-combat" phase of the occupation.
This ruling will exclude the vast majority of injuries from potential
compensation. For example, claims are ineligible in the case
of soldiers mistaking civilians for combatants. However, some
military commanders have been making ad-hoc discretionary payments
to the victims or their families. When this was pointed out,
a US official said he would investigate these payments and, if
necessary, tell the commanders concerned to stop making them.
[13]
So much for the "sympathetic"
Pentagon--but exactly how justifiable is the USA's fear of "millions"
of claims against it?
Given that most Iraqis who are asking
for damages "seek a few thousand dollars to get their lives
running again", it is possible to make an estimate of the
cost of such reasonable compensation and then compare it to other
expenditures in this war. Assuming the Pentagon's "millions"
of claims were a credible prediction, then perhaps two million
Iraqis (including those seeking only compensation for financial
losses) could be awarded $10,000 each. That would amount to $20
billion, or the cost of occupying the country for 5 months, which
Sec. of State Rumsfeld has pegged at $4 billion a month. [14]
This is a large sum, to be sure, but
not one that the US isn't already countenancing in its open-ended
occupation of Iraq. And arguably, the US occupation could be
cut short by as many months and its soldiers sent home wreathed
in roses if the US were to distribute its money in this way.
If however we restrict our calculations
to more realistic scenarios and 20,000 injury claims at $10,000
each, the total amount awarded would be $200 million--less than
the US spends every two days on the occupation. (And approximately
the amount the UK spends monthly in its role.[15])
What excuse can the US possibly have
for declining this opportunity to do some good for those who
desperately need it (and for whose hurt it is responsible), and
in the process, win back some of that "goodwill" it
has lost in Iraq and much of the world? Even if the number of
claims or of average awards is ultimately twice or ten times
higher than this, it will still be trivial compared to the overall
cost of the war and occupation.
Hamit Dardagan,
John Sloboda and Kay Williams run the invaluable
Iraq Body Count project.
They can be reached at: hamit@iraqbodycount.org
Notes:
1. As at July 7th 2003. The Minimum total
count of injuries in the IBC database is 16,439. However, given
the more limited reporting of injuries by the media and IBC's
data-gathering methodology which focuses on reports of deaths,
we feel that in this instance the Maximum count (of 19,733) is
likely to be a closer approximation to the true number of wounded--and
as discussed in the body of this report, may itself be an under-estimate.
2. http://www.un.org/
3. Pepe Escobar, Asia Times Online, April
4 2003 http://atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/ED04Ak07.html
4. Robert Fisk, Independent, April 3
2003 (IBC incident x030) http://argument.independent.co.uk/commentators/
5. Michael Weisskopf, Time Magazine,
May 3 2003 (IBC incident x072) http://www.time.com/time/magazine/
6. Jason Burke, Guardian, June 26 2003
(IBC incident x100) http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,985237,00.html
7. http://www.icrc.org/
8. "But due to the lack of time
and sutures, the limbs after being amputated were sewn up very
basically and bandaged. 'They are re-opening the bandages and
trying to stitch the wounds up properly.'"--Dr Jemilah Mahmood
of Mercy Malaysia, who brought much-needed supplies to the hospital
and suffered a bullet wound in the process. Reported in The
Star Online, April 18 2003
9. "Medical staff here [at 86th
Combat Support Hospital at Tallil Airfield] have admitted more
than 500 people since the war began--most of them Iraqi men,
women and children. Many more have been treated for ailments
that didn't require hospitalization."--Associated Press,
April 26 2003. http://www.etaiwannews.com/
10. After the ordeal of seeing their
three other children killed when a US tank machine-gunned their
car in Nasiriyah, Daham and Gufran Ibed Kassim and their wounded
five-year-old daughter Mawra were taken for treatment at a US
Army field hospital:
"For two nights, the remains of
the family slept in a bed. It appears that the story is reaching
an end. 'Wait!' insists Kassim, his tears preparing themselves
for what is to come, as if his trials could get any worse. 'Don't
ask me questions. I will tell you what happened.' On the third
night, that of 27 March, 'there were some Americans wounded that
night, in the fighting. Maybe they needed the beds. So they told
us we had to go outside. I heard the order--"put them out"--and
they carried us like dogs, out into the cold, without shelter,
or a blanket. It was the days of the sandstorms and freezing
at night. And I heard Zainab crying: "Papa, Papa, I am cold,
I am cold." Then she went silent. Completely silent.' Kassim
breaks off in anguish. His wife continues the story of the night.
'What could we do? She kept saying she was cold. My arms were
broken, I could not lift or hold her. If they had given us even
a blanket, we might have put it over her. We had to sit there,
and listen to her die.'Ed Vuillamy, The Observer, July 6, 2003
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/
11. 1. Al-Rutbah children's hospital
(on March 19) http://www.fortwayne.com/
2. Al-Yarmouk, Baghdad (on April 7) http://www.28news.com/stories
3. General Surgical Hospital, Nasiriyah (on March 24) http://observer.guardian.co.uk/
12. Scott Wilson, Washington Post, May
31 2003 http://www.washingtonpost.com/
13. "U.S. Limits Payments to Kin
of Slain Iraqi Civilians"--Robyn Dixon, LA Times, August
4, 2003 http://www.latimes.com/
14. "The Cost Of Occupation"--Dorothy
Pomerantz, Forbes.com, July 15 2003 http://forbesbest.com/2003/07/15/cz_dp_0715conflict.html
(It has been widely mooted--including by officials in Dick Cheney's
office--that the occupation's costs could be borne directly by
Iraqis through the sale of their oil.)
15. "Cost of occupation: £5m
a day--human cost extra"--Richard Norton-Taylor and Larry
Elliott, Guardian July 17 2003 http://politics.guardian.co.uk/Print/0,3858,4714030,00.html
Weekend Edition Features for August 2/3, 2003
Tamara
R. Piety
Nike's Full Court Press Breaks Down
Francis
Boyle
My Alma Mater, the University of Chicago, is a Moral Cesspool
David
Vest
Sons of Paleface: Pictures from Death's Other Side
Neve Gordon
Nightlife in Jerusalem
Uri
Avnery
Their Master's Voice:
Bush, Blair and Intelligence Snafus
Robert
Fisk
Paternalistic Democracy for Iraq
Jerry
Kroth
Israel, Yellowcake and the Media
Noah Leavitt
What's Driving the Liberian Bloodbath: Is the US Obligated to
Intervene?
Saul
Landau
The Film Industry: Business and Ideology
Ron Jacobs
One Big Prison Yard: the Meaning of George Jackson
Thomas
Croft
In the Deep, Deep Rough: Reflections on Augusta
Amadi Ajamu
Def Sham: Russell Simmons New Black Leader?
Poets'
Basement
Vega, Witherup, Albert and Fleming
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