WHO PAYS THE PRICE OF WAR?
THE IRAQI PEOPLE

America's war in Iraq has killed more than 100,000 civilian Iraqis, according to the study by a research team at John Hopkins University, published by the British medical journal The Lancet in October 2004. The survey documented an extra 100,000 Iraqi civilian deaths since the invasion, compared to the death rate in the preceding year, when Saddam Hussein was still in power - and this estimate did not even count excess deaths in Fallujah, which has been the site of intense violence and a huge number of deaths.

The risk of violent death was 58 times higher than before the US invasion, the researchers said, adding that the figure of 100,000 is a conservative estimate. Most of the deaths were caused by aerial bombing of Iraq's urban areas and more than half of the victims were women and children.

Yet this carnage is systematically ignored in the United States, where the media and government portray a war in which there are no civilian deaths because there are no Iraqi civilians - only "insurgents". Public reaction in the US was as alarming as the Lancet study - for there was no reaction. The New York Times ran a single story on page 8 on October 29, without interviewing a single member of the Bush administration or a U.S. military official. On the same day, The Washington Post carried a single story on page 16. No follow-up stories or editorials appeared. This reveals the ease with which a supposedly civilized country can engage in the mass murder of civilians without a public outcry.

A former US marine, Jimmy Massey, 33 said he had seen troops shooting civilians at road blocks and in the street. "We were shooting people as they got out of their cars trying to put their hands up," said Mr Massey. "I don't know if the Iraqis thought we were celebrating their new democracy. I do know that we killed innocent civilians." Mr. Massey said US troops in Iraq were told that all Iraqis were potential terrorists. As a result, he had watched his colleagues open fire indiscriminately. In one 48-hour period, he estimated his unit killed more than 30 civilians in the Rashid district of southern Baghdad. "I was never clear on who the enemy was," he explained. "If you have no enemy or you don't know who the enemy is, what are you doing there?"
- Andrew Buncombe in Washington, Independent, December 9 2004

Of the hundreds of dead people I saw on the roads leading from the Kuwait border to Baghdad, 20 percent or more were obviously civilians. I will never forget the three or four women I saw fatally shot and partially burned, still seated in a bus on the road north of Nasiriyah. Or the little girl, about four, lying by the side of the road in a pretty dress, her legs neatly and inexplicably chopped off at the knees. I remember thinking at the time that, mercifully, she was dead like all the others.
- Evan Wright, embedded with the Marines, in Village Voice, November 24 2004

The first US assault on Fallujah in April 2004 killed 800 civilians. In the even more violent assault in November 2004, houses were pounded from the air, killing entire families in their homes. Hundreds of corpses of men, women and children were left to decompose in the houses, gardens and streets. Those who survived wandered like ghosts through the ruins, looking for bodies of their relatives. Many of the women found dead in their houses were not veiled, meaning there were no men other than family members inside. There were no weapons, no spent cartridges. It is clear that what happened in Fallujah was an act of barbarity, the cold-blooded massacre of helpless and defenceless civilians.

Conditions in Fallujah are catastrophic, but the plight of the people of Fallujah is not unique. Many have witnessed the escalation of Israeli-style collective punishment of Iraqi cities and the killing of civilians, coupled with enormous damage to homes and infrastructure, has became the daily reality. Arbitrary arrest is rife and if the US troops come in search of a person who is not at home, it is common for them to arrest his son or brother or even a neighbour, often with disastrous results.

Quite literally every "liberated" Iraqi I know from my earliest days in the country has either had a family member or a friend killed by U.S. soldiers or by the effects of the war/occupation. Sadiq Zoman is fairly typical of what I've seen. Taken from his home in Kirkuk in July 2003, he was held in a military detention facility near Tikrit before being dropped off comatose at the Salahadin General Hospital by U.S. forces one month later. While the medical report accompanying him, signed by Lt. Col. Michael Hodges, stated that Mr. Zoman was comatose due to a heart attack brought on by heat stroke, it failed to mention that his head had been bludgeoned, or to note the electrical burn marks that scorched his penis and the bottoms of his feet, or the bruises and whip-like marks up and down his body.

I visited his wife Hashmiya and eight daughters in a nearly empty home in Baghdad, most of its belongings having been sold to keep them all afloat. A fan twirled slowly over the bed as Zoman stared blankly at the ceiling. Her daughter Rheem, who is in college, voiced the sentiments of the entire family when she said, "I hate the Americans for doing this. I pray for revenge on the Americans for destroying my father, my country, and my life." - Dahr Jamail, January 7 2005, TomDispatch.com

It's not surprising that the Iraqi people are bitter, witnessing the broken promises, broken lives and broken cities. While the so-called liberators hide in their military bases behind concrete blast-barriers, outside those walls the devastation, suffering and death have reached levels never imagined under Saddam Hussein. Is this what the United States meant by the liberation of the Iraqi people - liberating them into the grave ?

The American invaders have brought tragedy to the Iraqi people. We say they should leave Iraq NOW, with no conditions, and pay reparation for their crimes.

Americans Against the War - France
March 18, 2005