3.B. Projects based on direct research carried out on the ground in Iraq

To our knowledge, four direct research projects have been completed and published up to the present time, and another three have been announced as under way but not completed.

3.B.1 Completed direct reports (in chronological order of publication)

Three of the completed reports have focused on civilian casualites in Baghdad, and there is probably considerable overlap between them.

On 26 April a group of researchers associated with the Spanish Brigade Against the War’s Arab Cause Solidarity Campaign published a report [PDF] entitled Evaluation of the attacks on the civilian population of Baghdad (#7), which

“[R]elates 42 documented cases of attacks on the Iraqi civilian population carried out by the Anglo-American forces in the metropolitan area of Baghdad between 20 March and 5 April 2003, mostly by aerial bombing and missile strikes, but also land-based attacks that took place during the initial phase of occupation of the city. These cases have been documented on the ground by the Spanish Brigades group that was present in the Iraqi capital from the beginning of the war until 9 April, when US troops entered the area of the city where we were staying. Also included are reports of nine hospital visits, with testimonies of attacks that have not been sufficiently identified.”

The report includes a very detailed account of the methodology employed. The core data consists of 114 questionnaires completed by surviving victims of these attacks or their relatives who were direct witnesses. These were augmented by records from 5 hospitals covering the entire area of Baghdad: the Al-Kindi Hospital, the Al-Yarnouk University Hospital, the Saddam Hospital Complex; the Al-Nourman Hospital; and the Saddam City Hospital. Interviews were habitually conducted within a few hours of the attack victim’s admission, but were followed up during more prolonged interviews with the affected families, usually in relatives' houses. This immediate and direct information was complemented by data from visits to the places bombed and interviews with the neighbours of affected families.

Reconstruction of the stories of the families of bombing victims was laborious and occasionally fruitless. Due to the systematic destruction by US/UK bombing of the telecommunications system, and the impossibility of summoning ambulances to collect the victims, when an attack took place, families and neighbours would take injured and dying to different hospitals. As these were also unable to communicate with one another, they could not inform family members about their respective admissions.

For these and other reasons, the authors caution that the information in the report cannot be considered to be an exhaustive record of all coalition attacks (and consequent casualties). Rather “it should be regarded as a significant report of their breadth, systematic nature and severity”. However, the data compiled in their report document a total of 204 civilian fatalities and a further 583 injuries, making an average of 4.5 dead and 13 injured per attack.

The authors conclude, on the basis of what is undoubtedly the most direct and painstaking analysis of casualties so far to emerge from the war that

“the damage caused to the civilian population during the three weeks in which Baghdad was attacked was in no way due to mistakes, nor did it represent the “collateral damage” of a tactical surgical war, whose sole objective had been the destruction of the city’s governmental and military infrastructure. Our opinion.. is that the attacks were premeditated, designed to cause the greatest possible number of civilian victims, many being carried out repeatedly against densely populated and poor areas of the Iraqi capital. The logic of this conduct can only be explained by the deliberate will of the American and British political and military leaders to provoke terror and undermine the resistance of the Baghdad population.”

This study has not been reported by a single English-language news or media agency, to our knowledge.

Although not providing cumulative estimates of numbers of civilian casualties, the work of the Iraq Peace Team (IPT - an initiative of the Chicago-based Voices in the Wilderness organisation) is worth mentioning in this context. On April 4th this group published a report entitled “Civilian casualties and infrastructure damage in the 2003 US-led attack on Baghdad March 20 - April 1 2003”. This report is based on first hand observation and on interviews conducted by the Iraq Peace Team in Baghdad hospitals and neighbourhoods. Given the very limited resources of the team and given the constraints of operating in a war zone, the authors acknowledge that their report is a mere sampling and an unsystematic one at that. However, the Spanish Brigades Project has used some of the data provided by the Iraq Peace Team in its own more systematic report, as has the indirect project by the PDA (#6). One advantage of the IPT report not shared by any other we deal with is the inclusion of a considerable amount of photographic evidence of damage to individuals and to buildings. It is also the earliest compilation of civilian casualties to come out of Baghdad, but because it does not include estimates of numbers dead, it is not included in our table as a “project”. Much like the Spanish Brigade’s project this group’s work has been largely ignored by the mainstream media, with only the news website ElectronicIraq.net providing regular updates on their activites.

On May 4th, three journalists working for US-based Knight Ridder Newspapers published a report on the Death toll in 19 Baghdad hospitals (#8). Various stories providing differing degrees of detail about this study were widely syndicated through the Knight Ridder stable of newspapers, which operate in most US states.

No full account of the research has been published, but what can be pieced together from these press reports is that the estimates were “gleaned from archives that separated military from civilians” and “included those killed between March 19, when the US air war began, and April 9 when the city fell to American forces”. Although Iraqi doctors interviewed admit that their records were not perfect (war conditions did not allow for that), the data supplied were claimed to be accurate. Only seven of the 19 hospitals in the study are mentioned by name, although the overwhelming majority of the dead were said to have been counted at just three, named hospitals:

“The records show 1,101 deaths that doctors felt were clearly those of civilians, 845 of which were recorded at three hospitals - Al Kharama, Al Askan and Yarmuk - near the Baghdad airport.

An additional 1,255 dead probably were civilians, doctors say, all reported at the same three hospitals near the airport. At Al Kharama, 30 per cent of 450 such bodies belonged to women and children, doctors said.

Others were men without identification in civilian clothes who the doctors believed were civilians. But a final determination was not made, in part because of the enormous volume of bodies to be dealt with.”

The same records show more than 6,800 wounded. The report also provides evidence that the biggest number of deaths occurred on April 5th and 6th when US troops began fighting their way into the city. This report suggests that the Spanish Brigade researchers were able to take witness evidence relating to fewer than 10% of the total civilian deaths caused by coalition action in the battle for Baghdad.

On May 18th the Los Angeles Times published a report by its staff writer Laura King entitled Baghdad’s Death Toll Assessed (#9). The headline to this story reads:

“At least 1,700 Iraqi civilians died and more than 8,000 were injured in the battle for the Iraq capital, according to a Los Angeles Times survey of records from 27 hospitals in the capital and its outlying districts. In addition, undocumented civilian deaths in Baghdad number at least into the hundreds and could reach 1,000, according to Islamic burial societies and humanitarian groups that are trying to trace those missing in the conflict.”

Like the Knight Ridder project (#8) there is no full report of the research beyond that which is reported in the single LA Times story on the work. Similarly, only a minority of the hospitals surveyed are mentioned by name in the press report. The LA Times project records casualties up until 24th April, some two weeks after the fall of the Iraqi regime. This means that some fatalities from unexploded ordnance are included in this project, as well as from continued fighting after 9th April. Also notable is that the study is not restricted to hospital records but includes mosque-based volunteer burial associations who dealt with“undocumented” deaths, often of those who died on stretches of road.

The failure of either the Knight Ridder or the LA Times projects to give an exhaustive compilation of deaths by hospital means that it is almost impossible to know how much overlap there is between these two projects, or how either of them relate to the Spanish Brigade project, even though all three projects centre their work on Bahgdad hospitals during the same period of time.

For meaningful use to be made of these two newspaper-funded projects it is essential that a full and rigorous compilation of data is either published or made available to a competent authority to combine with, and compare to, other data. This brings us to the most recent and ambitious press study, published on June 10th:

“Someone has taped together the shredded binding, as if that could fix the horrors inside. 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 vivid pointer to the conditions prevailing in Iraq’s hospitals forms the introduction to another hospitals-based investigation conducted over five weeks by a team of Associated Press (AP) journalists. Covering civilian deaths recorded in the month between March 20 and April 20, the Associated Press Tally (#10) was restricted to 60 “accessible” hospitals (out of 124) throughout Iraq, and concluded that these hospitals recorded “at least” 3,240 civilians killed by the war.

Though geographically more wide-ranging than the other newspaper tallies, AP is refreshingly open about its incompleteness. Stating that “the count is still fragmentary,” AP notes that if ever there is a complete toll, it “is sure to be significantly higher” :

“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.

The AP excluded all counts done by hospitals whose written records did not distinguish between civilian and military dead, which means hundreds, possibly thousands, of victims in Iraq’s largest cities and most intense battles weren't reflected in the count.”

Another point in the AP study’s favour is its publication of a breakdown of most of its findings by hospital in “key” cities:

• Baghdad: 1,896 (recorded at 24 hospitals)
• Najaf: 293 (four hospitals)
• Karbala: 200 (one hospital)
• Mosul: 118 (five hospitals)
• Samawa: 112 (two hospitals)
• Nasiriyah: 145 (three hospitals)
• Fallujah: 89 (one hospital)
• Madain: 71 (one hospital)
• Diwaniya: 61 (one hospital)
• Kut: 52 (two hospitals)
• Tikrit: 45 (one hospital)

This is useful, but it would have been better still for each hospital to be named. Another (self-imposed) limitation is that the AP study attempted to “protect the integrity of its tally” by excluding numbers not based on daily record-keeping:

“In Basra, Iraq’s second biggest city, hospitals issued 413 death certificates and officials estimated 85 percent were for civilians, but the hospitals did not keep daily records listing civilian or military status of casualties. The AP did not include any Basra deaths in its count.”

This means that the grand total of civilian deaths in Basra for the AP study is zero (instead of around 350, if it had trusted “officials’” - actually, doctors’ - estimates), giving good grounds for the authors' conclusion that the actual numbers, both in Basra and elsewhere, were significantly higher.

Neither the Knight Ridder, LA Times or AP studies are defined by any specific aims. Presumably they are the results of normal journalistic enterprise, including the delivery of an exclusive story which can be used to the benefit of the employer and the career of the journalist. It would, therefore, hardly be expected that these journalists would directly co-operate with one another. Yet such co-operation would have ensured that there was no duplication of effort, and that meaningful summative compilations could have drawn on these reports.