Maliki says foes will use U.S. leaks against him

By Ernesto Londoño
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, October 23, 2010; 3:18 PM

BAGHDAD - Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said Saturday that his opponents are using leaked classified U.S. military reports to discredit his administration as he struggles to secure a second term in office.

Maliki's government also said in a statement in response to the trove of documents released Friday night by the whistleblower group WikiLeaks that it would investigate newly disclosed shootings by employees of the American security company formerly known as Blackwater.

"We need to take these documents into consideration in order to achieve justice for our citizens," the statement said.

Referring to details of cases in which U.S. forces had killed Iraqi civilians, the statement said the U.S. military's "permissive" rules of engagement had led to a "point of crisis" between the two countries.

The documents show that U.S. soldiers killed at least 700 Iraqi civilians in situations where the troops felt threatened. They also suggest that American soldiers were ordered to refrain from formally investigating cases of inmate abuse by Iraqi police and soldiers.

While the nearly 400,000 documents disseminated by WikiLeaks have not produced major revelations, Iraqi politicians are likely to seize on newly disclosed details for political gain as negotiations over the formation of a new government drag on.

Neither Maliki nor Ayad Allawi, his main rival in the March 7 parliamentary elections, has been able to form a coalition large enough to govern.

Jamal al-Battikh, a leader in Allawi's Iraqiya alliance, said security agencies under Maliki's control are to blame for the sort of inmate torture detailed in the leaked files.

"In our dialogue with all the other blocs, we have demanded the disbandment of the security agencies that were causing violations of human rights," he said. "These kinds of security agencies are causing all the harm."

Some Sunni leaders said the information in the reports detailing torture in Iraqi prisons was a vindication of claims they have been making for years.

"These releases haven't brought anything new to us, because for four or five years we have been calling for these practices to stop," said Omar al-Jubouri, a Sunni politician. "Maybe they will give more credibility to what we have been saying, because now the Pentagon confirms it while before they were just citizens' claims that were denied."

Baghdad residents interviewed Saturday did not show much interest in the leaks, saying the little they have heard about them on television sounded like old news.

"I only saw the subtitles," Adnan Mehdi, 62, said while sitting outside an electronics shop in downtown Baghdad. "We're used to violence. We don't care anymore about what happens."

Across town, in the predominantly Sunni neighborhood of Dora, Khattab Musli, 23, said government forces will continue to be heavy-handed, with or without American intervention, regardless of who prevails politically.

"Right now, we have the law of the jungle," he said. "The strong will eat the weak."

In London, meanwhile, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange heralded the release of the documents as major step toward accountability in the Iraq war. He also strongly defended the whistleblowing Web site against criticism from the Pentagon and elsewhere that the disclosures represent a security risk.

"This disclosure is about the truth," he said at a news conference.

John Sloboda, co-founder of Iraq Body Count, a London-based organization that has kept the most comprehensive tally of Iraqi civilian deaths since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, said the new documents pointed to at least 15,000 "previously undisclosed" civilian deaths in addition to the 107,000 in the group's database.

Secret Iraq war files offer grim new details

By Greg Miller and Peter Finn
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, October 23, 2010; 12:33 AM

A massive cache of secret U.S. field reports from the Iraq war provides grim new details about the toll of that conflict, indicating that more than 100,000 Iraqis were killed during a six-year stretch and that American forces often failed to intervene as the U.S.-backed government brutalized detainees, according to news organizations given access to the documents by the WikiLeaks Web site.

The nearly 400,000 records are described as offering a chilling, pointillist view of the war's peak years, documenting thousands of civilian deaths - including hundreds killed at checkpoints manned by U.S. soldiers - and the burgeoning role that American contractors came to play in the conflict.

But the logs are perhaps most disturbing in their portrayal of the Iraqi government that has taken control of security in the country as U.S. forces withdraw.

The documents, including some dated as recently as 2009, report the deaths of at least six detainees in Iraqi custody because of abuse, and cite hundreds of other cases in which prisoners were subjected to electric shock, sodomized, burned, whipped or beaten by Iraqi authorities, according to an account in the Guardian, a British newspaper that was among several news organizations given advance access to the logs.

The others included the New York Times, the Qatar-based al-Jazeera satellite television network, Germany's Der Spiegel magazine, the French newspaper Le Monde and the Channel 4 news program in Britain. WikiLeaks, an anti-secrecy group that uses servers in several countries, published the records on its Web site (WikiLeaks.org) Friday evening.

There appear to be no major revelations in the latest logs. Much like those WikiLeaks released earlier this year on the war in Afghanistan, the Iraq documents are mainly low-level field reports that reflect a soldier's-eye view of the conflict but do not contain the most sensitive secrets held by U.S. forces or intelligence agencies.

The Pentagon condemned the release but did not question the authenticity of the files.

"We deplore WikiLeaks for inducing individuals to break the law, leak classified documents and then cavalierly share that secret information with the world, including our enemies," said Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell. He said the military would not comment on the information contained in the records but stressed that the "reports are initial, raw observations by tactical units. They are essentially snapshots of events, both tragic and mundane, and do not tell the whole story."

Even so, the spilling of so many once-secret files into public view allows for a fine-grained examination of the war. The 391,832 files included in the release cover a period from the beginning of 2004 to the end of 2009, and are more than quadruple the number of records that WikiLeaks published on the war in Afghanistan.

WikiLeaks has not disclosed the source of the materials. But suspicion has centered on Pfc. Bradley Manning, 22, an Army intelligence analyst whom the military arrested this year, charging him with the downloading and transfer of classified material.

Although narrow in nature, the records provide new insights into the toll of the conflict. According to al-Jazeera, the documents show that the U.S. military kept a tally of Iraqi casualties, even while insisting that such statistics were not maintained.

The files indicate that 285,000 casualties were recorded, including at least 109,032 violent deaths, although reports suggested some double-counting. Of those, 66,081 were civilians, 23,984 were "enemy," 15,196 were members of the Iraqi security forces, and 3,771 were U.S. and allied service members.

The numbers correspond roughly to figures released by the Pentagon this year in response to a Freedom of Information Act request submitted by the Associated Press. Iraq Body Count, a London-based organization that has tracked civilian casualties, said it had identified 15,000 previously unrecorded deaths in the newly released files.

Beyond the broad outlines of the casualty counts, the records offer glimpses of the circumstances in often-heartbreaking detail.

The logs document the killing of as many as 681 civilians at checkpoints - "escalation of force incidents" in the military parlance - where troops fearing suicide bombers opened fire on often-confused drivers who did not know how to act when approaching soldiers, especially at night.

The Guardian reported that in September 2005, near Musayyib, south of Baghdad, two U.S. soldiers opened fire on a car when it continued to approach them after the driver ignored flashing lights and warning shots. A man and his wife were killed, and their 9- and 6-year-old children were wounded.

A month later, again at night, two children were killed in Baghdad when a female driver continued to approach a checkpoint after a single warning shot was fired.

The files also record the bloody toll of soldiers and civilians killed by insurgents' increasingly sophisticated use of roadside bombs: 31,780 deaths were attributed to improvised explosive devices.

The logs record numerous and often horrifying instances of torture and abuse by Iraqi military and police forces, many of which U.S. troops chose to ignore because of orders to refer such matters to senior Iraqi officers, according to the Guardian's reading of the documents.

In one case, in August 2009, a U.S. military doctor found "bruises and burns as well as visible injuries to the head, arm, torso, legs and neck" on the body of a man that police said killed himself.

In another case, in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, coalition forces reported that three Iraqi officers poured acid on the hands of a man and cut off some of his fingers. Two years after the event no arrests had been made, according to one of the documents.

The logs do record attempts by U.S. and coalition forces to stop the abuse by conducting spot-checks on Iraqi facilities where they found prisoners "covered in injuries," the Guardian reported.

But U.S. soldiers often could do little more than demand that the torture stop. An order, issued in June 2004, instructed troops to make an initial report but not to investigate breaches of the laws of war "unless directed by HQ," according to documents cited by al-Jazeera and the Guardian.

The records do not represent the first time that abuses by Iraqi authorities have been disclosed. In November 2005, U.S. troops discovered a Ministry of Interior-run prison in which more than 150 Sunni inmates were being held without charges. The prisoners were emaciated and several lifted up their shirts to show bloody whip marks where they had been beaten, according to U.S. officials who took photographs of the facility. News of the facility was leaked to U.S. and Iraqi newspapers, and U.S. commanders confronted then- Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jafari about the facility. No punitive action was taken.

In 2007, Gen. David H. Petraeus, then the top commander in Iraq, put pressure on the Interior Ministry to replace virtually all of the battalion and brigade commanders in the Iraqi National Police, a force that had been repeatedly accused of killing and torturing Sunnis in Baghdad.

Revelations about rampant state-sanctioned torture could shape the political debate in Iraq amid protracted negotiations toward the formation of a government. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is attempting to hold on to his post but has failed to get a simple majority in parliament on his side.

The logs accuse Iran of providing extensive, lethal support to Shiite militias in Iraq as part of an effort to weaken the standing of Sunnis in government and engage in a proxy campaign against the United States. The New York Times cited documents indicating that Iran's Quds Force collaborated with Iraqi extremists to encourage the assassination of Iraqi officials.

But some of news reports treated the claims with skepticism. The Guardian noted that sources for some of the reports on Iran were described as "untested or of low reliability."

WikiLeaks was founded in 2006 by a former computer hacker, Julian Assange. In contrast to the release of the Afghan documents, WikiLeaks redacted names and locations in what members said was a step to ensure there was no chance of exposing Iraqi civilians to reprisal.

The organization has undergone stresses of late. Several members have left in recent months, citing differences with Assange and the direction of the group. Assange is facing allegations in Sweden of rape and sexual harassment, which he has denied, saying the charges are part of a U.S.-orchestrated smear campaign.

Are We Starting To Win?

New weapon systems—and, even more, improved intelligence—may be giving Americans an edge in Afghanistan.

By Fred Kaplan
Slate
Thursday, Oct. 21, 2010

U.S. and Afghan forces are "routing the Taliban in much of Kandahar Province," according to a front-page story by Carlotta Gall in today's New York Times—in large part the result, Gall reports, of "a new mobile rocket that has pinpoint accuracy."

The rocket has destroyed insurgents' hideouts, killed their commanders, and driven many survivors to throw down their arms, abandon their positions, or in some cases retreat to Pakistan.

But the accurate rockets are only a part of the story. More important are the huge advances in intelligence gathering—again, just in the last few months—that have let the U.S. artillery troops know precisely where the bad guys are and, therefore, where to aim their big guns.

The touted weapon is the Guided Multiple-Launch Rocket System, which has a range of 43 miles and is fitted with a GPS guidance system that steers its 200-pound high-explosive warhead to within 1 meter of its target. (Some have called the weapon a "70-kilometer sniper round.")

The GMLRS and the High-Mobility Artillery Rocket System—a 15-ton wheeled vehicle carrying a computerized fire-control system that launches the weapons—have both been around since 2005, though only last year were they deployed with U.S. Army artillery units in significant number.

But accuracy and range mean nothing by themselves. Last February, for instance, 12 Afghan civilians were killed when two GMLRS munitions hit the wrong house. The weapons hit the targets they were aimed at, but the intelligence was mistaken in reporting that insurgents were inside.

It's the intelligence that's changed in recent months—and it has changed dramatically.

Along with the surge of troops and the shift toward much more aggressive attacks on insurgency strongholds (as reported here last week), Gen. David Petraeus, the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, has intensified intelligence-gathering operations to a still greater (though less-reported) extent.

The air over Afghanistan's heavy fighting spots is jammed with intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance devices—drones, towers, even blimps filled with various sensors. (One senior officer told me that the number of these blimps has soared from eight to 64 just in the last month.)

All this information is collected and interpreted by a growing number of imaging and intelligence analysts. Still more important, it's coordinated with information gathered on the ground by special-operations officers and—increasingly—by Afghan security forces, who are better able to gain the trust of local Afghans who dislike the Taliban.

According to a NATO officer, many of the Taliban's hideouts and strongholds are defended by a ring of improvised explosive devices. Therefore, the only way to take out some of these targets is with "smart bombs" dropped from the air or highly accurate artillery rockets fired from a distance. (Older-style artillery would be out of the question, as the first few rounds would unavoidably explode far from their targets and kill many civilians, since these targets tend to be in the middle of towns or cities.)

Only in the last few months have U.S. forces been able to gather and analyze the intelligence information that has made these attacks possible.

The attacks seem to be taking a toll. The Times story reports that the Taliban "talk with awe" of the rockets, because they're so accurate and seem to come from out of nowhere. Many fighters have abandoned their positions; some Taliban commanders, Gall reports, have disobeyed their leaders' orders to storm Kandahar and resist the NATO onslaught.

So are we turning the tide, gaining momentum, and—the ultimate goal of the military campaign—degrading the Taliban to the point at which their leaders are compelled to stop fighting and hold talks on reconciliation with Afghanistan's constitutional government?

In a tactical sense, maybe we are. President Barack Obama's strategy for Afghanistan has been in effect only since the summer. When he recently said that the strategy was on course and that he anticipates no major changes as a result of the official review this December, he may have had in mind this momentum of the last few months.

As Petraeus did in Iraq, more quickly and to a greater degree than even his supporters expected, he seems to be creating the conditions under which key factions might hammer out a political settlement.

But the big strategic question is whether these factions—including, not least, the government's leaders—have the desire, wherewithal, or ideological flexibility for a settlement. This remains highly uncertain in Iraq as well as in Afghanistan—and, in both countries, will depend on developments and decisions beyond the control of Obama, Petraeus, or any other outsider.

Become a fan of Slate on Facebook. Follow Slate and the Slate Foreign Desk on Twitter.
Fred Kaplan is Slate's "War Stories" columnist and a Schwartz Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation. His latest book, 1959: The Year Everything Changed, is now out in paperback. He can be reached at war_stories@hotmail.com.

A Grim Portrait of Civilian Deaths in Iraq

By SABRINA TAVERNISE and ANDREW W. LEHREN
NYTimes.com
October 22, 2010

The reports in the archive disclosed by WikiLeaks offer an incomplete, yet startlingly graphic portrait of one of the most contentious issues in the Iraq war — how many Iraqi civilians have been killed and by whom.

The reports make it clear that most civilians, by far, were killed by other Iraqis. Two of the worst days of the war came on Aug. 31, 2005, when a stampede on a bridge in Baghdad killed more than 950 people after several earlier attacks panicked a huge crowd, and on Aug. 14, 2007, when truck bombs killed more than 500 people in a rural area near the border with Syria.

But it was systematic sectarian cleansing that drove the killing to its most frenzied point, making December 2006 the worst month of the war, according to the reports, with about 3,800 civilians killed, roughly equal to the past seven years of murders in New York City. A total of about 1,300 police officers, insurgents and coalition soldiers were also killed in that month.

The documents also reveal many previously unreported instances in which American soldiers killed civilians — at checkpoints, from helicopters, in operations. Such killings are a central reason Iraqis turned against the American presence in their country, a situation that is now being repeated in Afghanistan.

The archive contains reports on at least four cases of lethal shootings from helicopters. In the bloodiest, on July 16, 2007, as many as 26 Iraqis were killed, about half of them civilians. However, the tally was called in by two different people, and it is possible that the deaths were counted twice. Read the Document »

In another case, in February 2007, an Apache helicopter shot and killed two Iraqi men believed to have been firing mortars, even though they made surrendering motions, because, according to a military lawyer cited in the report, “they cannot surrender to aircraft, and are still valid targets.” Read the Document »

The shooting was unusual. In at least three other instances reported in the archive, Iraqis surrendered to helicopter crews without being shot. The Pentagon did not respond to questions from The Times about the rules of engagement for the helicopter strike.

The pace of civilian deaths served as a kind of pulse, whose steady beat told of the success, or failure, of America’s war effort. Americans on both sides of the war debate argued bitterly over facts that grew hazier as the war deepened.

The archive does not put that argument to rest by giving a precise count. As a 2008 report to Congress on the topic makes clear, the figures serve as “guideposts,’ not hard totals. But it does seem to suggest numbers that are roughly in line with those compiled by several sources, including Iraq Body Count, an organization that tracked civilian deaths using press reports, a method the Bush administration repeatedly derided as unreliable and producing inflated numbers. In all, the five-year archive lists more than 100,000 dead from 2004 to 2009, though some deaths are reported more than once, and some reports have inconsistent casualty figures. A 2008 Congressional report warned that record keeping in the war had been so problematic that such statistics should be looked at only as “guideposts.”

In a statement on Friday, Iraq Body Count, which did a preliminary analysis of the archive, estimated that it listed 15,000 deaths that had not been previously disclosed anywhere.

The archive tells thousands of individual stories of loss whose consequences are still being felt in Iraqi families today.

Misunderstandings at checkpoints were often lethal. At one Marine checkpoint, sunlight glinting off a windshield of a car that did not slow down led to the shooting death of a mother and the wounding of three of her daughters and her husband. Hand signals flashed to stop vehicles were often not understood, and soldiers and Marines, who without interpreters were unable to speak to the survivors, were left to wonder why. Read the Document »

According to one particularly painful entry from 2006, an Iraqi wearing a tracksuit was killed by an American sniper who later discovered that the victim was the platoon’s interpreter. Read the Document »

The archive’s data is incomplete. The documents were compiled with an emphasis on speed rather than accuracy; the goal was to spread information as quickly as possible among units. American soldiers did not respond to every incident.

And even when Americans were at the center of the action, as in the western city of Falluja in 2004, none of the Iraqis they killed were categorized as civilians. In the early years of the war, the Pentagon maintained that it did not track Iraqi civilian deaths, but it began releasing rough counts in 2005, after members of Congress demanded a more detailed accounting on the state of the war. In one instance in 2008, the Pentagon used reports similar to the newly released documents to tabulate the war dead.

This month, The Associated Press reported that the Pentagon in July had quietly posted its fullest tally of the death toll of Iraqi civilians and security forces ever, numbers that were first requested in 2005 through the Freedom of Information Act. It was not clear why the total — 76,939 Iraqi civilians and members of the security forces killed between January 2004 and August 2008 — was significantly less than the sum of the archive’s death count.

The archive does not have a category for the main causes of Iraqi deaths inflicted by Americans. Compared with the situation in Afghanistan, in Iraq aerial bombings seemed to be less frequently a cause of civilian deaths, after the initial invasion. The reports were only as good as the soldiers calling them in. One of the most infamous episodes of killings by American soldiers, the shootings of at least 15 Iraqi civilians, including women and children in the western city of Haditha, is misrepresented in the archives. The report stated that the civilians were killed by militants in a bomb attack, the same false version of the episode that was given to the news media.

Civilians have borne the brunt of modern warfare, with 10 civilians dying for every soldier in wars fought since the mid-20th century, compared with 9 soldiers killed for every civilian in World War I, according to a 2001 study by the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Wikileaks Iraq: data journalism maps every death

Data journalism allows us to really interrogate the Wikileaks Iraq war logs release. Here is the statistical breakdown

Simon Rogers

guardian.co.uk

Saturday 23 October 2010

Wikileaks Iraq: a man holds his wounded daughter outside in August 2006 after being injured in road side bomb explosion. Photograph: Ali Abbas/EPA

Data journalism works best when there's a lot of data to work with. Wikileaks' Iraq war logs release has dumped some 391,000 records of the Iraq war into the public arean. We've had them for a few weeks - what have we found out?

This is in a different league to the Wikileaks Afghanistan leak - there's a good case for saying the new release has made the war the most documented in history. Every minor detail is now there for us to analyse and breakdown but one factor stands out: the sheer volume of deaths, most of which are civilians.

Some key findings:

Total deaths

• The database records 109,032 deaths in total for the period
• The database records the following death counts: 66,081 civilians, 23,984 insurgents and 15,196 Iraqi security forces
• The worst place for deaths was Baghdad - 45,497, followed by MND north (which is the region that goes from Baghdad up to Kurdistan) where another 34,210 died. The quietest place was the north east with only 328 deaths

Murders and escalation of force

• 34,814 people were recorded as murdered in 24,840 incidents
• The worst month was December 2006 with 2,566 murders - and 2006 was the worst year with 16,870 murders
• The database records 12,578 escalation of force incidents (where someone is shot driving too fast at a checkpoint, for instance) - and these resulted in 778 recorded deaths

Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs)

• There were 65,439 IED explosions over the period - with 31,780 deaths recorded on the database from those alone.
• There were another 44,620 IEDs found and cleared
• The worst month for IED explosions was May 2007 with 2,080 IED explosions

Download the data

The Guardian has decided not to republish the entire database, largely because we can't be sure the summary field doesn't contain confidential details of informants and so on. But, so you have some data to play with, we have provided this spreadsheet. It contains the records of every incident where someone dies, nearly 60,000 in all. We have removed the summary field so it's just the basic data: the military heading, numbers of deaths and the geographic breakdown.

Get the fullscreen version

Google Fusion tables is fantastic for mapping out bulky datasets and they don't come much bulkier than this. We took all these incidents where someone had died and put it on the map above. The fullscreen version is easier to use. A few of the datapoints aren't mapping correctly - but this may be a problem with the data.

You can download it below, plus we've broken down the deaths by cause and year in sortable tables. What can you do with it?

Data summary

Deaths and wounded

YEAR	Coalition forces	Iraqi forces	Civilians	Enemy	TOTAL DEATHS	TOTAL WOUNDED, all categories
2004	747	1,031	2,781	5,995	10,554	18,567
2005	856	2,256	5,746	3,594	12,452	24,850
2006	821	4,370	25,178	4,657	35,026	41,164
2007	919	4,718	23,333	6,793	35,763	55,804
2008	282	1,948	6,362	2,635	11,227	23,632
2009	146	873	2,681	310	4,010	12,365
TOTAL	3,771	15,196	66,081	23,984	109,032	176,382

Causes of death

Category	Coalition forces	Iraqi forces	Civilians	Insurgents
Accident	428	256	599	22
Ambush	4	93	85	154
Arrest	0	12	20	56
Arson	0	6	114	6
ARTY	0	0	2	41
Assassination	0	183	246	7
Attack	86	1,167	1,627	3,775
Attack Threat	0	0	1	1
Blue-Blue	9	2	3	4
Blue-Green	0	51	4	0
Blue-White	0	0	62	1
Border Ops	0	0	0	2
Breaching	0	0	1	0
Cache Found/Cleared	2	10	28	236
Carjacking	0	5	27	5
Close Air Support	0	0	5	776
Confiscation	0	0	3	57
Cordon/Search	2	43	47	316
Counter Mortar Fire	0	0	0	24
Deliberate Attack	0	3	0	119
Demonstration	1	16	476	2
Detain	0	2	19	87
Direct Fire	482	4,270	4,766	6,807
Direct Fire Threat	0	0	1	0
Elicitation	0	1	0	0
Equipment Failure	4	2	3	0
Escalation of Force	0	22	686	70
Explosive Remnants of War (ERW)/Turn In	0	0	1	0
Green-Blue	5	14	3	0
Green-Green	0	58	17	2
Green-White	0	2	48	0
IED Explosion	2,107	5,990	20,228	3,455
IED False	0	0	3	0
IED Found/Cleared	6	31	90	579
IED Hoax	1	0	2	1
IED Pre-detonation	0	0	3	50
IED Suspected	0	0	0	37
IED Threat	0	0	0	2
Indirect Fire	192	284	2,087	1,040
Indirect Fire Threat	0	0	0	2
Intimidation Threat	0	6	18	1
Kidnapping	0	67	161	18
Kidnapping Threat	0	0	2	0
Looting	0	0	18	3
Medevac	3	1	5	2
Mine Found/Cleared	0	0	2	1
Mine Strike	37	24	30	6
Movement to Contact	1	0	0	77
Murder	9	2,169	32,563	73
Murder Threat	0	0	1	0
Other	194	72	584	437
Other Defensive	2	5	141	116
Other offensive	0	4	18	639
Patrol	0	3	43	61
Police Actions	0	1	14	32
Raid	12	75	86	619
Recon	0	0	0	13
Sabotage	0	2	6	0
SAFIRE	67	4	22	317
SAFIRE Threat	0	0	1	0
Search and Attack	0	0	0	90
Shooting	0	1	8	0
Small Unit Actions	27	13	65	3,129
Smuggling	0	1	5	2
Sniper Ops	86	173	62	364
Staff Estimate	0	2	380	0
Surveillance	0	1	8	61
TCP	0	0	5	25
Theft	0	8	57	14
Tribal Feud	0	14	138	5
UAV	0	0	3	49
Unexploded Ordnance	0	2	15	3
Unknown Explosion	4	24	284	61
Vehicle Interdiction	0	0	4	29
White-Blue	0	0	5	0
White-Green	0	0	0	1
White-White	0	0	20	0
Not known	0	1	0	0
TOTAL	3,771	15,196	66,081	23,984

Wikileaks Iraq war logs: every death mapped

Iraq war logs reveal 15,000 previously unlisted civilian deaths

Leaked Pentagon files contain records of more than 100,000 fatalities including 66,000 civilians

David Leigh
guardian.co.uk
Friday 22 October 2010 21.32 BST

Leaked Pentagon files obtained by the Guardian contain details of more than 100,000 people killed in Iraq following the US-led invasion, including more than 15,000 deaths that were previously unrecorded.

British ministers have repeatedly refused to concede the existence of any official statistics on Iraqi deaths. US General Tommy Franks claimed in 2002: "We don't do body counts."

The mass of leaked documents provides the first detailed tally by the US military of Iraqi fatalities. Troops on the ground filed secret field reports over six years of the occupation, purporting to tot up every casualty, military and civilian.

Iraq Body Count, a London-based group that monitors civilian casualties, told the Guardian: "These logs contain a huge amount of entirely new information regarding casualties. Our analysis so far indicates that they will add 15,000 or more previously unrecorded deaths to the current IBC total. This data should never have been withheld from the public."

The logs record a total of 109,032 violent deaths between 2004 and 2009. It is claimed that 66,081 of these were civilians. A further 23,984 deaths are classed as "enemy" and 15,196 as members of the Iraqi security forces. The logs also include the deaths of 3,771 US and allied soldiers.

No fewer than 31,780 of the total deaths are attributed to the improvised landmines laid around Iraq by insurgents. There were 65,439 successful "improvised explosive device" (IED) blasts in the period, according to the logs, with another 44,620 IEDs found in time and disarmed.

The other major recorded cause of death is the civil war that broke out during the US military occupation. There are 34,814 victims of sectarian killings recorded as murders in the logs. The worst single month was December 2006 when 2,566 Iraqis were found dead.

The data cannot be relied upon as a complete record of Iraqi deaths. IBC, for example, had previously calculated that up to 91,469 civilians were killed from various causes during the period covered by the leaked database. While detailing the 15,000 previously unknown deaths, it also omits many otherwise well-attested civilian fatalities caused by US troops themselves. Nor does the Pentagon data cover any of the initial invasion fighting throughout 2003; IBC has identified 12,080 purely civilian deaths in that year.

The US figure is far lower than another widely quoted estimate of more than 650,000 "excess deaths" extrapolated on a different basis and published in a 2006 study in the Lancet.

A key example of the failure by US forces to record civilian casualties they have inflicted comes in the two major urban battles against insurgents fought in 2004 in Falluja. Numerous buildings were reduced to rubble by air strikes, tank shells and howitzers, and there were well-attested deaths of hundreds of civilians. IBC has identified between 1,226 and 1,362 such deaths during April and November. But the leaked US internal field reports record no civilian casualties at all.

One of the most publicised allegations was that a clinic in central Falluja was shelled on 9 November. Doctors claimed to international media that two strikes on the roof had killed scores of patients and staff. The IBC puts the total number of civilian deaths at 59.

The US military maintained these claims were "unsubstantiated", and the leaked database does not record any civilian deaths in the logs of these incidents.

But the logs do reveal corroborating evidence, furnished at the time by US troops involved in the fighting, that the clinic was a target for shelling.

A surveillance unit reported that it "observed anti-Iraq forces unloading a vehicle at the clinic south of the Hydra mosque … Another vehicle arrived and an unidentified number of armed individuals exited the vehicle."

On that morning of 9 November the field reports describe heavy street fighting as the area is surrounded and the mosque captured. A detachment of the 1st Battalion 8th US Marines called in repeated heavy artillery strikes.

At 6.53am the marines' Bravo company, "heavily engaged" by machine-guns, rocket-propelled grenades and sniper fire, called in eight successive high explosive rounds from 155mm howitzers that landed in the mosque area.

The soldiers then signalled: "Battle damage assessment unknown." This is a frequent report about air and artillery strikes during the entire week of ferocious fighting.

At other times the troops record Iraqi deaths but invariably classify all the corpses as "enemy". When a helicopter gunship killed two Reuters journalists with a group of other men in a Baghdad street, in one notorious 2007 incident, all were listed as "enemy killed in action".

John Sloboda, IBC co-founder, has called for a British judicial inquiry into the civilian deaths, which he says have not been addressed by the Chilcot hearings. "If we try to hide the reality of what happened we are going to sow seeds of hatred among those whose trust we are trying to gain and in whose name we said we were doing all of this."

Death and body bags

Al-Ahram Weekly
Salah Hemeid
10/20/2010

A new US estimate of the number of Iraqis killed seven years after the US-led invasion serves as a reminder that civilians are dying on a daily basis in Iraq, writes Salah Hemeid

Former US secretary of state Madeleine Albright's famous quotation apparently justifying the deaths of half a million Iraqi children as a result of the Washington- backed and UN-imposed sanctions against Iraq in the 1990s has often been remembered as a cold-blooded assertion of US policy objectives.

The aphorism came to mind again last week when US media reported that the United States had finally released its first official compilation of data on Iraqi casualties, more than seven years after its invasion of the country.

The report, posted on the US Central Command website in July, drew little notice until last Thursday, when media outlets published details showing that 63,185 civilians and 13,754 members of the Iraqi security forces had been killed from early 2004 to August 2008.

It is not clear why the figures did not include casualties from the immediate aftermath of the US-led invasion in 2003, or from the period after August 2008. It is not clear either how the data were compiled and using what methodology.

The figures seem to represent a "policy engineered" anti-climax as the Obama administration, facing a mid- term election challenge, tries to bring an end to America's misadventure in Iraq.

The number of Iraqis killed during the US-led invasion and its aftermath has long been hotly debated, estimates ranging from fewer than 100,000 to more than a million.

Knowing how these latest US figures were arrived at would speak volumes about how the United States is faring as it prepares to exit from Iraq.

The casualty figures released by Washington are lower than those from Iraqi government sources. Last year, the Iraqi Ministry of Human Rights reported that 85,694 Iraqis, including military and police personnel, had been killed from the beginning of 2004 through to October 2008.

In January 2008, the World Health Organisation (WHO) estimated that 151,000 deaths had taken place in the country due to the violence, with a 95 per cent confidence estimate of between 104,000 and 223,000 from March 2003 through to June 2006. The figures were based on the results of an Iraq family health survey published in the New England Journal of Medicine, a respected US journal.

Another estimate from the Iraq Body Count, a non- governmental organisation based in Britain that uses media accounts, has put the number of civilian dead in Iraq at 47,668 during the same period as the WHO study. The group's latest figures for civilian deaths from violence in the country until September 19 2010 stood at between 98,252 and 107,235.

A 2006 survey in The Lancet, a British medical journal, estimated that more than 600,000 Iraqis had died as a result of the war, a figure more than 10 times higher than other estimates at the time.

Iraq has not officially reacted to any of the studies, though many Iraqis have rejected the new US figures on the number of civilian deaths in the conflict, saying that they are well below the actual numbers who have died.

The numbers are misleading, critics say, because they are not based on a well- defined methodology dealing with all violence-related deaths, including assassinations and in operations conducted by the US military.

Estimates of casualty figures during the US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq have been controversial because of the high political stakes involved and the possibility of manipulation aimed at swaying public opinion. The recent report was prompted by a Freedom of Information Act request from the National Security Archive at George Washington University.

Scepticism has arisen about these latest figures not only because of possible discrepancies and the mysterious standards used to establish the magnitude of the casualties, but also because the parties involved have been reluctant to tell the truth about this human tragedy.

A fundamental question is why the US military, which bears primary responsibility for the conflict, failed to address the issue start from the start and why it did not keep accurate records on the victims of the invasion and occupation.

The military's apparent incapacity to provide statistics about the causalities of US air bombardments and other related operations is a real and pressing concern.

Another question of concern is why the US media, omnipresent in Iraq since the 2003 invasion, has not capitalised on its high standards of professionalism to gather accurate data about the human tragedy in Iraq.

The Associated Press kept a record for the period from 28 April 2005 to 30 September 2010 listing some 49,416 deaths.

Yet, even more disturbing than these US failures has been the failure by successive Iraqi governments to establish an efficient process of data collection to register the deaths of Iraqi citizens and to compensate their families.

Failure to collect data and dodgy statistics are not the only problems. There is also the problem of how to count deaths that are directly related to the war and occupation, separating them from deaths as a result of violence in the country.

Absent from the debate is any explanation of the humanitarian crisis that has struck Iraq since the 2003 US-led invasion, including increasing poverty, unemployment, the deterioration of health services and the destruction of the country's ecological system.

Statistics such as those released by the US military have also largely ignored Iraqi fatalities caused by a lack of clean drinking water and a breakdown in utilities.

Humanitarian agencies like the International Committee of the Red Cross have warned that the country's healthcare facilities face grave shortages of staff and supplies, with the water, sewage and electricity infrastructure being in critical condition.

Rates of cancer, leukemia and brain tumours, widely believed to have been caused by US weaponry, have been on the rise, some research suggesting that they rival those reported among survivors of the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The US military's report on the death toll in Iraq comes at a time when US President Barack Obama has reached his lowest ratings in US opinion polls ahead of crucial mid-term elections next month.

The release of the statistics while Obama embarks on a campaign to drum up support for Democratic Party candidates cannot be a coincidence.

By publishing a limited number of casualties in Iraq, the Obama administration may be hoping that it can go ahead with its policy of "turning the page" in Iraq, ending the US military presence in the country by the end of next year.

Exiting from Iraq would benefit the Democratic Party, whose president vowed to end the legacy of the Republican Party and its president in Iraq.

If all goes to plan, Iraq will no longer be front-page news in America, as US soldiers pack up to leave in order to help Democrats achieve some sort of hoped-for victory in next month's elections.

However, the very day this article was sent to print, a spate of bomb attacks across Iraq killed and wounded many people, serving as proof that the threat of death remains a part of daily life in the country.

If Albright's idea that the price paid by Iraqi civilians for US policy "is worth it" can serve as any sort of reminder in this sad chapter of Iraq's history, then it should be that the US-led invasion has turned into a humanitarian tragedy, as well as an American national predicament.

Pentagon Releases Tally of Dead Iraqis

By Rory O'Connor
October 15, 2010

Editor’s Note: From the start of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003, the Bush administration refused to provide figures on the number of Iraqis killed, yet disputed estimates of war-related deaths that ranged up to one million.

Now, in a surprise development, the Pentagon has posted, without any fanfare, its totals for most of the war, numbers well below other tallies, eas Rory O’Connor notes in this guest essay:

In July, the United States military issued its largest release of raw data on deaths during the Iraq war. The Pentagon tallied almost 77,000 Iraqis – both civilians and security forces – as having died in the carnage between January 2004 and August 2008.

As the Associated Press reported, the information went unnoticed for months after being “quietly posted on the Web site of the United States Central Command without explanation.”

It was only recently discovered by the AP “during a routine check…for civilian and military casualty numbers,” which the news agency had first requested in 2005 through the Freedom of Information Act.

As AP noted, “The military has repeatedly resisted sharing its numbers, which it uses to determine security trends.”

(One exception: U.S. military officials in Baghdad released their July 2010 Iraqi casualty tally in order to refute the Iraqi government's much higher monthly figures, a decision made just weeks before U.S. forces withdrew all but 50,000 troops from Iraq.)

According to the AP, “a spokesman at Central Command headquarters in Tampa, Fla., could not answer basic questions about the information.”

Iraqi Health Ministry officials were equally reticent and refused to discuss the American figures, which fall thousands of deaths short of those the Iraqis have compiled using actual death certificates.

The American data claimed 76,939 Iraqi security service members and civilians killed and 121,649 wounded between January 2004 and August 2008. (The count shows that 3,952 American and other international troops were killed over the same period.)

The Iraqi Human Rights Ministry reported last October that 85,694 people were killed from the beginning of 2004 to Oct. 31, 2008, and 147,195 wounded. (Notably, these tallies do not include the period of the U.S. invasion and conquest of Iraq in March and April 2003.)

Certainly estimating casualties in Iraq has been an inexact process, and various figures have long been disputed as attempts to manipulate the political debate either by minimizing or exaggerating the numbers to sway public opinion.

The mysteriously-derived U.S. military figures rank as the lowest. One tally by a private, British-based group that has tracked civilian casualties since the war began estimates that between 98,252 and 107,235 Iraqi civilians were killed from March 2003 to Sept. 19, 2010. Other estimates of war-related deaths have been much higher, up to and even over one million.

Curious as ever about the meaning of events at the nexus of media and politics, let me ask a few questions:

1. Why was the U.S. military’s most extensive death tally ever of the Iraq war released without comment or explanation and buried on a Web site for months?

2. Why can no one in the U.S. military answer “basic questions” about the tally months after it was made, such as how it was compiled, why it was released, and whether the new numbers included suspected insurgents?

3. Why has the U.S. military repeatedly resisted requests to share its comprehensive figures on Iraqi civilian casualties?

4. Why was the U.S. death figure well below that of the Iraqi government?

5. Finally, whatever else you may think about the so-called “lamestream media,” would we ever have even known about the Pentagon’s largest release of raw data on deaths during the Iraq war without the Associated Press requesting casualty numbers through the Freedom of Information Act – and then “routinely” checking for them?

Rory O’Connor is a journalist and filmmaker, and co-founder of the media firm Globalvision. He is author of Shock Jocks: Hate Speech and Talk Radio. [This story appeared at http://www.roryoconnor.org/]

U.S. reports 77,000 Iraqi fatalities from 2004 to August 2008

By Leila Fadel
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, October 15, 2010; A11

BAGHDAD - The U.S. military released its most detailed compilation of data on Iraqi casualties during more than four years of the Iraq war, reporting that 63,185 civilians and 13,754 members of the country's security forces were killed from the beginning of 2004 through August 2008.

The number of Iraqis killed in the more than seven-year-old war is a hotly debated topic. Estimates range from fewer than 100,000 to hundreds of thousands, and it is difficult to determine which number is the most accurate.

The casualty figures released by the United States are lower than Iraqi government accounts. Iraq's Human Rights Ministry reported last year that 85,694 Iraqis, including military and police personnel, were killed from the beginning of 2004 through October 2008.

A spokesman for the ministry said the U.S. military data were close to its figures and should not be dismissed. "In the end, human life is not measured by numbers," said Kamel Amin, the spokesman. "This number has social consequences. Behind the number of dead are scores of handicapped people, widows and orphans."

The U.S. data include the bloodiest years of the war, from 2005 to 2007, when sectarian violence gripped the nation.

In the period covered by the U.S. report, at least 121,649 Iraqis were wounded. Among coalition troops, 3,592 were killed and 30,068 wounded.

The U.S. military collects detailed information on Iraqi casualties but has largely been unwilling to make it public, only occasionally releasing limited data on civilian fatalities. The report, which was posted on the U.S. Central Command Web site in July but drew little notice until Thursday, was prompted by a Freedom of Information Act request from George Washington University's National Security Archive.

The figures do not include the immediate aftermath of the U.S.-led military invasion in 2003. A U.S. military spokesman said it was unclear whether insurgent killings were included in the data.

A controversial 2006 survey in the Lancet, a British medical journal, estimated that more than 600,000 Iraqis had died as a result of the war, a figure more than 10 times as high as other estimates at the time. Iraq Body Count, a public database of civilian deaths since 2003, puts the number between 98,252 and 107,235.

The U.S. military figures were broken down by province and trace the arc of Iraq's sectarian war. In 2006, more than 2,100 Iraqi civilians were killed on average each month - a sharp escalation from about 239 killings a month in 2004.

Civilian killings soared in 2007, sometimes amounting to more than 3,000 a month, and slowly dropped off at the end of the year amid the surge of U.S. troops. In July 2008, 804 Iraqi civilians were killed; 488 died the next month. Over the past two years, Iraq has experienced a steady but much lower level of violence.

WikiLeaks' Iraq War Scoops

Some of these Pentagon papers are new, interesting—and make Iraqis and Iranians look worse than Americans.

By Fred Kaplan
Slate
Friday, Oct. 22, 2010, at 7:53 PM ET

The latest cache of WikiLeaks documents—391,832* of them, leaked from the Pentagon's secret archives on the Iraq war—are now up, in summarized form, on the Web sites of the New York Times, Britain's Guardian, Le Monde, and Der Spiegel.

Judging from the excerpts and analyses in the English-language papers, the documents contain a few new and interesting things, some of which may not please the war critics who tend to be among WikiLeaks' biggest fans.

First, it seems that Pentagon officials were keeping a log of civilian casualties, though spokesmen frequently said at the time that they weren't. A secret Defense Department report estimated that just over 100,000 noncombatants were killed between 2004 and 2009.

The WikiLeaks documents reveal some previously unknown instances of casualties caused by Americans—for instance, a 2007 incident in which an Apache helicopter crew killed two Iraqis who were trying to surrender. More intriguing, this helicopter had the same call sign, "Crazyhorse 18," as the Apache that later accidentally killed two Reuters reporters.

However, the bigger finding is that, at least according to the Pentagon's secret report, most Iraqi civilian deaths were caused by other Iraqis. The report calculates 31,780 Iraqis killed by roadside bombs and 34,814 by sectarian killings (notated as "murders").

The overall number is consistent with estimates by Iraq Body Count, a private organization that attempts to track casualties through media reports. However, an IBC press release put out on Friday said that, after scouring the WikiLeaks documents, the group has seen references to 15,000 deaths that it had not previously reported—thus boosting its count from 107,000 to 122,000.

By that measure, the Pentagon's estimate is a bit on the low side. However, the WikiLeaks documents add further doubts to a controversial report in a 2006 issue of the medical journal the Lancet, claiming that, even that early in the war, 655,000 Iraqi civilians had been killed, most of them by U.S. air and artillery strikes.

The WikiLeaks documents also bear out claims by some U.S. officials at the time that Iran was playing an active role in supporting Iraqi Shiite militia groups—supplying them with rockets and particularly lethal IEDs, training their snipers, and helping to plot assassinations of Iraqi officials. These activities apparently continued after Barack Obama was elected president.

Perhaps the most startling document, summarized in one of the several New York Times stories about the archive, tells of a violent border incident on Sept. 7, 2006, when an Iranian soldier aimed a rocket-propelled grenade launcher at a U.S. platoon. Before he could fire the RPG, an American soldier killed the Iranian with .50-caliber-machine-gun fire. The U.S. platoon, which had been near the border looking for Iranian infiltration routes, withdrew under fire.

Nothing grew out of this skirmish, but this is the first time any mention has been made of a firefight between U.S. and Iranian forces during the Iraq war.

Finally, the WikiLeaks documents offer abundant evidence that, while some American guards behaved horrendously toward Iraqi detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison, Iraqi police and soldiers have behaved much worse.

The documents reveal several instances of U.S. soldiers witnessing Iraqi abuses. In some cases, they tried to stop the abuse, to no avail. In one case, a soldier reported an incident to his superior, who wrote on the report, "No investigation required."

Last summer, just before he disseminated thousands of leaked documents on the Afghanistan war, Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, told Der Spiegel, "This is something that I find meaningful and satisfying. That is my temperament. … I enjoy helping people who are vulnerable. And I enjoy crushing bastards."

These new documents indicate, whether Assange realizes it or not, that not all the bastards are American.

Correction, Oct. 25, 2010: This article originally misstated the number of documents in the latest WikiLeaks release. (Return to the corrected sentence.)

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Fred Kaplan is Slate's "War Stories" columnist and a Schwartz Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation. His latest book, 1959: The Year Everything Changed, is now out in paperback. He can be reached at war_stories@hotmail.com.