The Scale of Civilian Casualties

"The deaths of civilians in Iraq may indeed add up to violations of the Geneva Conventions, especially Article IV. This became apparent to me last year, when I headed a multinational team of medical and public health researchers to investigate the scale of fatalities associated with the U.S. invasion of Iraq and subsequent violence.

The resulting report, published in the British medical journal The Lancet, estimated around 100,000 and possibly far more civilians have died because of the invasion. Our study was based on 988 household interviews in 33 randomly picked neighborhoods from across the entire country, and covered the period between on the beginning of the war (March 2003) and September 2004.

Most disturbing and certain about the results, is that over 80 percent of violent deaths were caused by U.S. forces and that most of the people they killed were women and children. None of the deaths we recorded involved intentional wrongdoing on the part of individual soldiers, instead being mostly from artillery and aerial weaponry. When I presented these results to about thirty Pentagon employees last fall, one came up to me afterwards and said, "We have dropped about 50,000 bombs, mostly on insurgents hiding behind civilians. What the [expletive] did you think was going to happen?" Our survey team's 100,000 death estimate for the first 18 months after the U.S. led-invasion equates to about 101 coalition-attributed violent deaths per day."

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 http://www.alternet.org/story/31508/