Death in Iraq
The number of US troops killed in Iraq has reached 2,5OO, the US administration has announced. Each death is an agonising thing for families of dead soldiers, but will this be the magic number that further tips US public sympathy against Bush's war?
Tragically, we can barely know how many Iraqi civilians have been killed to date. ABC news has reported "Each month now [Baghdad's] morgue receives about the same number of gunshot deaths every month that it received during the whole of last year."
They don't know how many dead are brought to other morgues. How can we accurately know the toll this war is having on Iraqi civillians?
Labels: Iraq war
posted by Mark Lawrence @ 2:28 pm
3 comments
3 Comments:
As at about 12 months ago the civilian estimates ranged between 25K (US) and 100k (Lancet):
http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200507/s1417965.
By coincidence, 100k is about equal to the estimated number of civilians killed during the entire Saddam regime.
China rolls out the Lancet figure whenever the US mentions its human rights record.
Recent evidence is that the rates this year will be much higher.
David
I heard that finding published in the Lancet a year ago. But of course the figure will be higher this year - considering that the Iraqis are now reporting as many gunshot deaths each month as there were the entire year of 2005. And those are gunshot deaths - so many are killed by bomb blasts these days (not to mention the other brutal deaths - including aerial bombing).
I've posted that ABC news item David referred to as a hot link here so readers can get to it easily.
Hi Mark. Have you seen Iraq Body Count? They're at least attempting to keep track of the number of Iraqi civilian deaths. They currently estimate more than 38,000 civilian deaths.
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