An Iraqi family gunned down after approaching a
U.S. patrol too fast. Dozens of men shot execution-style by
sectarian death squads.
Grisly killings of civilians have come to define the Iraq war.
New details found in government documents released by WikiLeaks,
however, provide a surprising level of detail about many attacks and
raise questions about how much the U.S. military knew during the
months it sought to play down reports of the slaughter.
The documents include reports from soldiers on the ground about
day-to-day violence and individual attacks - including shootings,
roadside bombings, and the execution-style killings and targeted
assassinations that left bodies in the streets of Baghdad at the
height of sectarian violence that pushed the country to the brink of
civil war.
The information is full of military jargon and acronyms but often
includes names of victims, times of day of the attacks and the
neighborhoods where they occurred.
That contradicted years of statements by American officials, who
have repeatedly resisted providing information about civilian
casualties. The U.S. military often told journalists in Baghdad it
did not keep detailed records of civilian deaths or have information
on particular attacks. In 2006 and 2007, the Bush administration and
military commanders repeatedly denied Iraq was sliding into civil
war and often played down the extent of civilian carnage, much of
which had no direct effect on U.S. forces.
The reports also point to a higher death toll than previously
believed.
Iraq Body Count, a private British-based group that has tracked
the number of Iraqi civilians killed since the war started in March
2003, said it had analyzed the information and found 15,000
previously unreported deaths. That would raise its total from as
many as 107,369 civilians to more than 122,000 civilians.
Rights groups criticized Washington for not releasing the
information, insisting that casualty information did not pose a
national security risk.
"The American public has a right to know the full human cost of
the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq," Jameel Jaffer of the American
Civil Liberties Union said in an e-mail. "A lot of this information
should have been released to the public a long time ago."
The U.S. military has maintained careful records of the number of
American service members who have died in Iraq - 4,425 as of
Saturday.
But civilian casualty figures in the U.S.-led war in Iraq have
been hotly disputed because of the political stakes in a conflict
opposed by many countries and a large portion of the American
public. Critics on each side of the divide accuse the other of
manipulating the death toll to sway opinion. Independent
confirmation of deaths in any particular attack was hard to obtain,
since journalists and watchdog groups were often unable to go to the
sites of many attacks due to the volatile security situation that
prevailed for much of the war.
The Iraqi government has issued a tally claiming at least 85,694
civilians and security officials killed between January 2004 and
Oct. 31, 2008.
In August 2008, the Congressional Research Service said the U.S.
military was withholding statistics on Iraqi civilian deaths. The
Pentagon did publish in June 2008 a chart on monthly civilian death
trends that showed it peaking at between 3,500 and 4,000 in December
2006. But it did not release the data used to create the chart.
In July this year, responding to a Freedom of Information Act
request, the U.S. military quietly released its most detailed tally
to date - 63,185 civilians and 13,754 Iraqi security forces killed
between January 2004 and August 2008.
Musaab Adnan, whose 27-year-old brother was killed in 2006 in the
crossfire between U.S. forces and insurgents in the western town of
Haditha, said the new WikiLeaks information would remind the world
of the war's brutality.
"It is hard to forget what happened. Those who were lost will
never be compensated. But the publication of these documents will
show the world the atrocity of these crimes against the Iraqis," he
said Saturday.
The war logs were made public in defiance of the Pentagon, which
insisted that the release would put the lives of U.S. troops and
their military partners at risk.
Although the documents appear to be authentic, their origin could
not be independently confirmed, and WikiLeaks declined to offer any
details about them. The Pentagon has previously declined to confirm
the authenticity of WikiLeaks-released records. But it has put to
work more than 100 U.S. analysts to review what was previously
released and has never indicated that any past WikiLeaks releases
were inaccurate.
Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell insisted the U.S. had done
its best to prevent innocent civilians from being killed.
"It has been a driving force for us, a guiding principle for us
over the last seven years of this conflict to do everything in our
power - perhaps more than any other military in the history of the
world has ever done - to minimize civilian casualties," Morrell
said Friday.
The 391,831 documents, which date from the start of 2004 to Jan.
1, 2010, provide a ground-level view of the war written mostly by
low-ranking officers in the field.
WikiLeaks offered The Associated Press and other news
organizations access to a searchable database of redacted versions
of the reports three hours prior to its general release Friday. A
few news organizations, including the New York Times, Le Monde, The
Guardian and Der Spiegel, were given access to the material far
earlier.
Iraq Body Count said it counted 109,032 violent deaths reported
in the documents, including 66,081 civilians. It cross-referenced
the reports with media reports in its own database and determined
that 15,000 were new.
IBC's John Sloboda praised the U.S. military for making such
detailed records - but criticized it for keeping the material
secret.
"Day by day, secretly, soldiers all over Iraq have been writing
detailed reports of the violent deaths they cause, witness or are
informed about," he told reporters Saturday in London. "It is very
good that this data has been collected but it is wrong and
unjustifiable that it has been kept secret for so long."
In one example, he said the war logs confirmed media reports of
35 bodies found in Baghdad on Nov. 1, 2006, but the military
documents had additional information about the timing of the
findings and the neighborhoods in which they were found, as well as
some of the identities of those killed.
Al-Jazeera, one of several news organizations provided advance
access to the WikiLeaks trove, said that from a review of the
documents, it tallied reports of 681 civilians killed in error by
U.S. and allied forces at checkpoints or by passing convoys. It said
most occurred in mainly Sunni areas, which have traditionally
provided the bulk of support for the insurgency.
Haidar Jabbar, a 55-year-old father of four in Baghdad, said the
documents dealt another blow to the U.S. legacy in Iraq.
"It is another black spot in the reputation of Americans in
Iraq," he said.
