965-1005 on Aimma Bridge, Baghdad

The figures given are from the most recent updates provided by the sources listed – under Iraq Body Count (IBC) methodology explicit updates displace early-breaking reports, and the most recent updates displace any earlier ones. Should further, reliable information emerge the figures will be revised accordingly.

In this incident another consideration was whether it should be included in IBC’s tally at all. Though compounded by gross incompetence on the part of the authorities, the link with the foreign military presence and the security crisis in the country is unmistakable:  

Government ministers accused agents provocateurs linked to Sunni Muslim militants of deliberately panicking the huge crowd of Shia Muslim pilgrims into a stampede. But in interviews with survivors, rescue workers and medical staff a far simpler version emerged.

The authorities had wanted to prevent possible suicide bombings against al-Kadhimiya shrine and had told guards to erect concrete barricades on the bridge and to search all pilgrims crossing the river.

Nearly a million worshippers converged on the site. The screening process was inadequate. A bottleneck developed on the bridge. People were either crushed or leapt for their lives into the river. [Times 01 Sep]

Many witnesses said the chaos was exacerbated by concrete barricades along the bridge that were meant to deter car bombers but also effectively hindered pilgrims’ ability to escape. [CT 01 Sep]

“We asked the army troops to lift the concrete barriers from the road but they told us that the Americans put them in and they can’t move them,” said Jasim Kinani, who was among the many black-shirted young male volunteers helping with crowd control around the shrine. [LAT 01 Sep]

Government sources, meanwhile, complained that the American military were partly to blame for the tragedy by failing to remove blast barriers from the bridge, which they said made it a bottleneck.

“The first mistake was the closure of all other bridges and the opening of just the smallest one,” said a defence ministry official. He said Brigadier Abdul Jalel Khalaf, commander of the Iraqi army’s 1st brigade, had asked the Americans to remove the concrete barriers, but they had refused.

The same official also accused the Americans of preventing ambulances passing through roadblocks to reach the scene. “The Americans took a very bad initiative,” he said. “They prevented the ambulances entering the area - it was a reason why so many died without the help of anyone.” Coalition authorities declined comment on the allegations. [Times 04 Sep]

The connection of this incident with the war and occupation, in its details as well as general circumstances, is well established. The fact that similar large-scale disasters have happened during religious events elsewhere (notably in Mecca in 1990) does not in any way lessen the case for considering this incident as a consequence of the military invasion and occupation of Iraq.

There is however a more complex question about the inclusion of this incident in IBC's count.

IBC has consistently taken care to exclude deaths from its database which are a part of the normal “background” level of deaths in Iraq. This has meant that whenever we added deaths from everyday phenomena such as crime, we first adjusted for pre-invasion criminal murder rates (in effect, 2002 rates) before adding any excess number to our count.

Despite this we have not included every type of reported or “excess” death. This is because some deaths, while perhaps traceable to the invasion, carried less clear moral culpability on the part of the invading powers. For instance, records at Baghdad’s central morgue include all sudden deaths involving physical traumas, such as also occur in car accidents. We have not included such excess deaths in our count, even though one might argue that a possible boom in car or alcohol imports could have led to more traffic accidents. While such a phenomenon might well be linked to the invasion, the invaders' responsibility for it would, we felt, have been too indirect to bring these deaths within the scope of IBC’s count. (To do so would have required additional information and a more complex analysis looking into wider issues, such as whether ambulance and emergency services had been noticeably degraded by the invasion, leading to a greater proportion of fatalities in accidents.)

To some extent the tragedy on Aimma bridge was also an “accident”, albeit of calamitous proportions and largely stemming from abjectly inept security measures. The question regarding its inclusion in IBC’s count doesn’t involve the incident’s “accidental” component – for instance, we include the deaths of several Iraqi children accidentally run over by coalition military convoys because their link to the invasion and military occupation is direct and obvious. Rather, it is prompted by a different consideration: that the incident was made possible by the existence of new, and unarguably invasion-related, freedoms:

Shia Islam, repressed under Saddam Hussein, has enjoyed a revival since his fall, despite sectarian attacks, including suicide bombings, by Sunni Arab insurgents. [GUA 01 Sep]

Under Saddam gatherings of this size were banned because he feared they would turn into political demonstrations. But since his overthrow these religious parades have become very popular. [IND 04 Sep]

Such public Shiite religious observances, banned during the rule of Saddam Hussein, have drawn vast crowds in the past two years and have been regular targets of insurgent bombings that have killed hundreds of worshipers. [WP 01 Sep]

The moral ambiguity here is that without the invasion, the freedom to gather in this procession would not have existed at all in Iraq; equally, without the other corollaries of the invasion and occupation (including a deadly and relentless armed resistance to its every manifestation) the tragic stampede would almost certainly have never occurred.

In a manner of speaking, therefore, the war is responsible for these deaths both from a “positive” and a “negative” standpoint: “positive” in the sense that for the first time in decades people are able to freely exercise certain forms of religious observance; and “negative” in view of pervasive post-invasion violence, fear of which led to the deadly stampede.

The question, then, is whether the religious freedoms brought about by the military intervention, as exemplified by the religious procession itself, somehow absolve the US/UK of moral responsibility for the terrible and (from the perspective of March 2003) unforeseeable tragedy which took place on August 31st 2005.

Our response to this question is that these governments’ responsibility doesn’t stop – in fact, doesn’t even principally reside in – the outcomes of the invasion. It is much more present in the means by which these governments chose to effect “regime change” in Iraq – namely by military conquest and dominion over the country.

And it is very much this particular means which is at the heart of the matter for IBC, for ours is a record of deaths resulting directly from military intervention in Iraq.

From this perspective, it is irrelevant how “noble” our governments’ intentions were, nor if their proclaimed goals were successfully realized; it doesn’t even matter if Iraq ultimately becomes some sort of earthly paradise. What matters is the human cost of the particular means employed by the US/UK governments and their coalition partners.

The particular dangers which led to the deaths on Aimma bridge were, as we have noted earlier, inextricably linked to the invasion and subsequent occupation. They are not simply the “inherent” risks of newly-established freedoms but arose directly from the military means by which these freedoms were delivered. They are therefore quite properly the concern of IBC.