UK and US authorities discourage counting of deaths as a result of the conflict. But academics are monitoring the toll and have identified a grim new milestone, reports David Randall

 
More than 10,000 civilians, many of them women and children, have been killed so far in the Iraqi conflict, The Independent on Sunday has learnt, making the continuing conflict the most deadly war for non-combatants waged by the West since the Vietnam war more than 30 years ago.

The passing of this startling milestone will be recorded today by Iraq Body Count, the most authoritative organisation monitoring the human cost of the war. Since the invasion began in March, this group of leading academics and campaigners has registered all civilian deaths in Iraq attributable to the conflict. They do this in the absence of any counts by US, British, or Baghdad authorities.

Iraq Body Count's co-founder, John Sloboda, said: "This official disinterest must end. We are now calling for an independent international tribunal to be set up to establish the numbers of dead, the circumstances in which they were killed and an appropriate and just level of compensation for the victims' families."

His call was backed by Bob Marshall Andrews, Labour MP for Medway. He said: "These are figures which are airbrushed out of the political equation and yet are central to whether it is possible to create a stable and democratic Iraq."

Iraq Body Count said last night that deaths are only recorded by them when reported by at least two media outlets. Its leading researcher Hamit Dardagan said that its careful, but necessarily incomplete, records are in contrast to "the official indifference" to counting either the Iraqi lives lost or those blighted by injuries.

Neither the US or British military, nor the Coalition Provisional Authority have kept a record of Iraq civilian or military casualties, and Washington and London have both rejected calls for them to compile such totals.

This attitude extends also to the provisional Iraqi government. Until late last year, an official at the Iraqi Health Ministry, a Dr Nagham Mohsen, was compiling casualty figures from hospital records. But, according to a barely noticed Associated Press report, she was, in December, ordered by her immediate superior, director of planning Dr Nazar Shabandar, to stop collating this data. The health minister Dr Khodeir Abbas denied that this order was inspired or encouraged by the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority.

Several other groups have attempted to make educated guesses of the war's true total of dead and injured. Among them is Medact, a organisation of British health professionals, most of whom are doctors. In November it published a report on the war's casualties and health problems in post-conflict Iraq. Omitted from this report was a suggestion that the total dead and wounded on both sides could be as high as 150,000-200,000. But in the end it was felt that the lack of scientific basis for this figure would undermine a carefully worded report.

One of the issues confusing any attempt to arrive at an accurate figure for the war's toll is the unknown number of Iraqi military who died. This is in marked contrast to the precise records of coalition service fatalities and injuries, which are kept by service arm, age, circumstance, and, in the case of wounded, by severity. Meanwhile, no one knows Iraqi military deaths to the nearest 20,000. Iraq Body Count concentrates on quantifiable civilian deaths.

On its website, the organisation says: "So far, in the 'war on terror' initiated since 9/11, the USA and its allies have been responsible for over 13,000 civilian deaths, not only the 10,000 in Iraq, but also 3,000-plus civilian deaths in Afghanistan, another death toll that continues to rise long after the world's attention has moved on.

"Elsewhere in the world over the same period, paramilitary forces hostile to the USA have killed 408 civilians in 18 attacks worldwide. Adding the official 9/11 death toll (2,976 on 29 October 2003) brings the total to just under 3,500."

Additional research by Caroline Grant
 

Munitions that ended up in the hands of children

Ali Abdul-Amir was one of many Iraqi civilians injured or killed by munitions left behind or not cleared by both sides in the conflict. At 2pm on 3 May the eight-year-old put a match to a piece of explosive ordnance outside a school in al-Hay al-Askari, a neighbourhood of Nasiriyah. The explosion left him with severe burns and shrapnel injuries (pictured left). Six days later in Baghdad, Muhammad Keun Jiheli, 16, brought a piece of ordnance home to use for cooking fuel. An explosion killed four members of his family. Muhammad suffered burns over 72 per cent of his body, and Jamil Salem Hamid, also 16, received burns over 54 per cent of his body.

Iraqi forces left behind more than 600,000 tons of munitions. Many had been stored in civilian areas, and were not secured or cleared by coalition forces quickly enough to prevent casualties. The town of al-Hilla was the worst affected by cluster submunitions used in battle that failed to explode on impact as intended. Easily discovered and picked up by children, they were still causing death or injury months after the conflict ended.

Research by Bonnie Docherty, Human Rights Watch
 

US air raid on Saddam's half-brother kills civilians

Four-month-old Dina Jabir was the only survivor when American bombs fell on the family home. Her father Zaid Ratha Jabir, 36, an engineer, and his family returned to their home in al-Karrada, Baghdad, on the night of 7 April to gather some belongings. They had been staying a mile away with Dina's great-uncle, Sa'dun Hassan Salih, shown here holding the baby. A strike levelled the Jabir home just after 9pm, killing six people. Dina was found the next day in a neighbour's yard. She had broken arms and legs, shrapnel in her skull and internal injuries, but was alive and would recover. The intended target, Saddam's half-brother Watban Ibrahim Hasan, was captured alive a week later.
 

Family wiped out by British cluster bombs in Basra

 

British forces caused dozens of civilian casualties when they used ground-launched cluster munitions in and around Basra, including a strike in the neighbourhood of Hay al-Zaitun on 25 March. Jamal Kamil Sabir, 25, lost his right leg to a blast while crossing a bridge with his family. His nephew took shrapnel in his knee and his wife still had shrapnel in her left leg two months later because doctors were afraid to remove it while she was pregnant. Submunitions had also fallen on al-Mishraq al-Jadid on 23 March, killing Iyad Jassim Ibrahim, 26, sleeping in the front room of his home, and 10 relatives with him.

The 45-minute case collapses (Part 1)

By Andy McSmith Political Editor
08 February 2004

The Prime Minister's ignorance is no defence

Tony Blair was sent three intelligence reports in the six months during the run up to the Iraq war, including one that warned him that information on whether Saddam Hussein still held any chemical or biological weapons was "inconsistent" and "sparse".

The revelation adds to the mystery of how the Prime Minister could tell Parliament last week that, when war began, he still believed that Iraq held weapons of mass destruction capable of being deployed in just 45 minutes.

That 45-minute claim, highlighted in a dossier which Mr Blair presented to the Commons in September 2002, inspired reports in the press that British servicemen and tourists in Cyprus could be hit at any moment by long-range Iraqi missiles.

In fact, John Scarlett, chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), and the Secretary of State for Defence, Geoff Hoon, knew that it was only "battlefield mortar shells or small-calibre weaponry" that could be deployed that quickly - but seemingly nobody told the Prime Minister, who said in the Commons last week that he did not find out until after 18 March, when MPs voted to go to war.

Yesterday Robin Cook, the former foreign secretary who resigned as Leader of the House in the run-up to the war, urged the committee of inquiry set up under Lord Butler to investigate why a vital piece of information was apparently withheld from the man who made the decision to send British troops in to fight.

Mr Cook, who is due to be interviewed on the ITV's Jonathan Dimbleby programme today, said: "One of the questions the Butler inquiry must ask is why on earth the JIC sent up three assessments of Saddam's weapons capacity without making it clear that they were talking about battlefield weapons, not strategic systems."

The committee, chaired by the former chief whip Ann Taylor, supported Tony Blair's claim that Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction posed a threat to Britain, and that - by implication - the Prime Minister was right to take part in a war without UN sanction.

They gave two reasons: that the Iraqi army, with or without weapons of mass destruction, might attack UK forces policing "no-fly zones", or that they might fire Al Hussein missiles at British forces in Cyprus.

Last week the Government slipped out a follow-up document, with the clumsy title Government Response to the Intelligence and Security Committee Report on Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction, which was placed with minimal publicity in the Commons Vote Office.

The document makes the startling revelation that the intelligence services had already reported, before the war began, that Iraq's ballistic missiles had probably been dismantled, and that the presence of UN weapons inspectors in Iraq was making it difficult for Iraq to threaten anyone with weapons of mass destruction.

The document added: "The JIC assessments produced in October and December 2002 and again in March 2003 reflected this point. In December 2002, the JIC specifically pointed out that Iraq's ability to use chemical and biological weapons (CBW) might be constrained by the difficulty of producing more whil. UN inspectors were present.

"In March 2003, [the JIC] stated that intelligence on the timing of when Iraq might use CBW was inconsistent and that the intelligence on the deployment was sparse.

"Intelligence indicating that chemical weapons remained disassembled and that Saddam had not yet ordered their assembly was highlighted. The JIC also pointed out the intelligence suggested that the 750km-range Al Hussein ballistic missiles remained disassembled and that it would take several days to assemble them once orders to do so had been issued."

The Liberal Democrat leader, Charles Kennedy, has defended his party's decision to boycott the Butler committee, saying that it "allows the wrong questions to distract attention from the real issues."

Writing in today's edition of The Independent on Sunday, he said: "What the Prime Minister has really done this week is to tell us to take it or leave it.

Forget inquiries - the people will be his judge."

Peter Hain, the Leader of the House, admitted last night that Mr Blair was no longer "unassailable". After seven years in power, he said, Labour had "hit our first very seriously choppy waters."
 

The 45-minute case collapses (Part 2)

By Raymond Whitaker and Kim Sengupta
08 February 2004

The "reliable source" who provided MI6 with the information that Iraq could deploy chemical and biological weapons within 45 minutes was an Iraqi exile who had left the country several years previously, The Independent on Sunday can reveal. That fact alone should have prevented the intelligence being used in the Government's September 2002 dossier on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

The 45-minute claim, repeated four times in the dossier, is at the centre of the dispute over Britain's case for war in Iraq. An IoS investigation has established at the highest level that the "reliable source" obtained the information at second hand from a serving officer in the Iraqi army, with the rank either of full colonel or brigadier.

The Iraqi exile was in Iraq during the first Gulf War in 1991, but later fled, possibly to Scandinavia. He did not make contact with British intelligence until he was outside Iraq; last summer Tony Blair and the Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, both told Parliament he was not a defector but "an established and reliable source". Mr Straw added he had been "reporting to us secretly for some years".

Said to have "military knowledge", the source maintained contacts with serving officers in Saddam Hussein's armed forces. But the fact that he was not in Iraq meant that the information he provided, especially on such an important point as whether Saddam had active plans to use chemical and biological weapons, did not meet normal standards for assessing intelligence, especially as it was unsupported by documentary evidence. There was no definite information on whether chemical or biological warheads were with front-line units, which would have made it feasible that they could be used within 45 minutes, or back in secure bases which would make it impossible.

The fact that the information was "single source", and was included in the dossier at a late stage, first emerged after the BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan reported what he had been told by the weapons scientist David Kelly, setting off a furore which led to Dr Kelly's suicide and the Hutton inquiry into his death.

Not until the inquiry did the public learn that the original information passed on by the Iraqi exile referred only to battlefield weapons. "It related to munitions, which we had interpreted to mean battlefield mortar shells or small calibre weaponry, quite different from missiles," John Scarlett, the chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee and author of the dossier, told Lord Hutton.

Evidence at the inquiry showed, however, that Mr Scarlett never used the word "munitions" in drafts of the dossier, allowing the claim to become inflated to one of WMD. Sir Richard Dearlove, the head of MI6, told the inquiry that the original information was "a piece of well-sourced intelligence", though he admitted that the way it was "misinterpreted" could mean that it had been given undue prominence.

The fate of the officer who provided the information remains a mystery. There are rumours that he is dead or missing.
 

  © 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd
http://news.independent.co.uk/low_res/story.jsp?story=489082&host=3&dir=62  (10,000 Civilian Deaths)
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/story.jsp?story=489101  part one
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/story.jsp?story=489100  part two