Gulf War II - Iraqi Casualties

Christian Science Monitor, May 22, 2003:
"Evidence is mounting to suggest that between 5,000 and 10,000 Iraqi civilians may have died during the recent war... Such a range would make the Iraq war the deadliest campaign for noncombatants that U.S. forces have fought since Vietnam.... preliminary reports from hospitals, morgues, mosques, and homes point to a level of civilian casualties far exceeding the Gulf War ... [In] the 1989 U.S. invasion of Panama, 13 Panamanian civilians died for every U.S. military fatality. If 5,000 Iraqi civilians died in the latest war, that proportion would be 33 to 1."

Iraq Civilian Casualty Tally is Attempted

Baghdad, Iraq - Someone has taped together the shredded binding. There are pages bathed in dried, reddish-brown blood, their letters smeared and unintelligible.

The frantic scribblings and bloody handprints are a record of war.

This ledger at Kadhamiya General Hospital is one of dozens of documents reviewed by The Associated Press over five weeks in an effort to count the civilian casualty toll from a month of fighting in Iraq.

The finding: At least 3,240 civilians died throughout the country, including 1,896 in Baghdad. The count is still fragmentary, and the complete number - if it is ever tallied - is sure to be significantly higher.

Several surveys have already looked at civilian casualties within Baghdad, but this is the first attempt to gauge the scale of such deaths from one end of the country to the other.

The count is based on records and interviews at 60 of Iraq's 124 hospitals - including almost all the large ones - and covers the period between March 20, when the war began, and April 20, when fighting was dying down and coalition forces announced they would soon declare major combat over.

Many of the 64 other hospitals are in small towns and villages, and were not visited because they are in dangerous or inaccessible areas. Some hospitals that were visited had incomplete records.

But even if hospital records were complete, they would not tell the full story. Many of the dead were never taken to hospitals, either buried quickly by their families in accordance with Islamic custom, or lost under rubble... [Article continues, edited for space.]