- An American patrol roared past us with the soldiers gesturing
furiously with their guns for traffic to keep back on an overpass in central
Baghdad. A black car with three young men in it did not stop in time and
a soldier fired several shots from his machine gun into its engine.
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- The driver and his friends were not hit, but many Iraqis
do not survive casual encounters with US soldiers. It is very easy to be
accidentally killed in Iraq. US soldiers treat everybody as a potential
suicide bomber. If they are right they have saved their lives and if they
are wrong they face no penalty.
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- "We should end the immunity of US soldiers here,"
says Dr Mahmoud Othman, a veteran Kurdish politician who argues that the
failure to prosecute American soldiers who have killed civilians is one
of the reasons why the occupation became so unpopular so fast. He admits,
however, that this is extremely unlikely to happen given the US attitude
to any sanctions against its own forces.
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- Every Iraqi has stories of friends or relatives killed
by US troops for no adequate reason. Often they do not know if they were
shot by regular soldiers or by members of western security companies whose
burly employees, usually ex-soldiers, are everywhere in Iraq.
-
- A member of the Iraqi National Congress, Ahmed Chalabi's
party, was passing through an American checkpoint last year when a single
shot rang out from a sniper. No US soldier was hit, but the troops at the
checkpoint hosed down the area with fire, wounding the INC member and killing
his driver.
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- The rector of Al-Nahrain University in south Baghdad
was travelling to a degree ceremony on the other side of the city when
white men in a four-wheel drive suddenly opened fire, hitting him in the
stomach. Presumably they thought he was on a suicide mission.
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- It was obvious to many American officers from an early
stage in the conflict that the Pentagon's claim that it did not count civilian
casualties was seen by many Iraqis as proof that the US did not care about
how many of them were killed. The failure to take Iraqi civilian dead into
account was particularly foolish in a culture where relatives of the slain
are obligated by custom to seek revenge.
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- The secrecy surrounding the numbers of civilians killed
reveals another important facet of the war. The White House was always
more interested in the impact of events in Iraq on the American voter than
it was in the effect on Iraqis. From the beginning of the conflict the
US and British armies had difficulty in working out who in Iraq really
was a civilian.
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- Marla Ruzicka, the American humanitarian worker who was
buried yesterday in California, had established in her last weeks in Iraq
that figures were kept based on after-action reports. Officially, she found,
29 civilians were killed in fire fights between US forces and insurgents
between 28 February and 5 April. But these figures are likely to be gross
underestimates.
-
- US soldiers are notorious in Iraq for departing immediately
after a skirmish, taking their own casualties but sometimes leaving damaged
vehicles. They would not have time to find out how many Iraqis were killed
or injured.
-
- The Health Ministry in Baghdad did produce figures and
then stopped doing so, saying they had not been properly collated. Iraqi
Body Count, a group monitoring casualties by looking at media sources,
puts the total at 17,384. But most Iraqis die obscurely; it is dangerous
for reporters, Iraqi or foreign, to try to find out who is being killed.
Much of Iraq is a bandit-ridden no-man's land.
-
- Even in Baghdad it is evident from the hundreds of bodies
arriving at the mortuary that this has become one of the most violent societies
on earth. The Iraqi Body Count figure is probably much too low, because
US military tactics ensure high civilian losses a bizarre aspect of the
war is that US commanders often do not understand the damage done by their
weapons in Iraq's close-packed cities.
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- US firepower, designed to combat the Soviet army, cannot
be used in built up areas without killing or injuring civilians. Nevertheless,
a study published in the Lancet saying that 100,000 civilians have died
in Iraq appears to be too high. But the lack of definitive figures continues
to dehumanise the uncounted Iraqi dead. As Dr Richard Garfield, a professor
of nursing at Columbia University and an author of the Lancet report, wrote:
"We are still fighting to record the Armenian genocide. Until people
have names and are counted they don't exist in a policy sense."
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- The immunity of US troops means that there is nothing
to inhibit them opening fire in what for them is a terrifying situation.
For all their modern armament they are vulnerable to suicide bombers and
roadside bombs. In the first case the attacker is already dead and in the
second the man who detonates the bomb is probably several hundred yards
away and in cover. With nobody else to shoot at it is the civilians who
pay the price.
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- ©2005 Independent News & Media (UK) Ltd.
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- http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=632439
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