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10-31-2005, 02:28 AM
Victims of insurgents in Iraq top 26,000
By Oliver Poole in Baghdad
(Filed: 31/10/2005)
The United States military has for the first time admitted that it is keeping records of Iraqi deaths as it disclosed that it estimates 26,000 to have been killed or injured by insurgents since January last year.
The data, released without fanfare in a report compiled by the Pentagon for the US Congress, says casualties, which include Iraqi police and soldiers as well as civilians, have risen from about 26 a day on last Jan 1 to 64 a day in the run-up to this month's constitutional referendum.
Attacks by insurgents have also tripled from just under 200 a week at the start of 2004 to more than 650 now.
The issue of official casualty counts has been a particularly controversial one as American officials in Iraq have repeatedly insisted that "we don't do body counts".
As recently as July a senior military spokesman said: "We do not have the ability to get accurate data."
This response was partly a reflection of the discrediting of the enemy casualty counts issued in the Vietnam War, which were later shown to be wildly inflated, but it was also widely believed to reflect a desire not to draw attention to the civilian cost of the conflict.
The Pentagon figures are understood to have been compiled from casualty reports filed by American units that had responded to an insurgent attack.
The statistics were included in a briefing document on Iraq demanded by Congress after it had approved an emergency spending bill to cover the continuing cost of the war. The casualty figures appear in a single graph on page 23.
Although the statistics are revealing, the Pentagon total was challenged yesterday by human rights groups who said they believed the official figures were on the low side.
Iraq's interior ministry has stated that 8,175 Iraqis were killed, and around 18,000 more believed injured, between August 2004 and May 2005 alone.
Iraq Body Count, an organisation that tracks civilian deaths through news reports, indicates that 26,000 to 30,000 Iraqi civilians have died since the war started in March 2003.
Of those, about 9,000 are reported to have been killed by the US military itself. Lt Col Barry Venable, a Pentagon spokesman, said that coalition forces did not respond to every insurgent attack and so some civilian deaths would have gone unrecorded.
Telegraph Group Limited 2005.
By Oliver Poole in Baghdad
(Filed: 31/10/2005)
The United States military has for the first time admitted that it is keeping records of Iraqi deaths as it disclosed that it estimates 26,000 to have been killed or injured by insurgents since January last year.
The data, released without fanfare in a report compiled by the Pentagon for the US Congress, says casualties, which include Iraqi police and soldiers as well as civilians, have risen from about 26 a day on last Jan 1 to 64 a day in the run-up to this month's constitutional referendum.
Attacks by insurgents have also tripled from just under 200 a week at the start of 2004 to more than 650 now.
The issue of official casualty counts has been a particularly controversial one as American officials in Iraq have repeatedly insisted that "we don't do body counts".
As recently as July a senior military spokesman said: "We do not have the ability to get accurate data."
This response was partly a reflection of the discrediting of the enemy casualty counts issued in the Vietnam War, which were later shown to be wildly inflated, but it was also widely believed to reflect a desire not to draw attention to the civilian cost of the conflict.
The Pentagon figures are understood to have been compiled from casualty reports filed by American units that had responded to an insurgent attack.
The statistics were included in a briefing document on Iraq demanded by Congress after it had approved an emergency spending bill to cover the continuing cost of the war. The casualty figures appear in a single graph on page 23.
Although the statistics are revealing, the Pentagon total was challenged yesterday by human rights groups who said they believed the official figures were on the low side.
Iraq's interior ministry has stated that 8,175 Iraqis were killed, and around 18,000 more believed injured, between August 2004 and May 2005 alone.
Iraq Body Count, an organisation that tracks civilian deaths through news reports, indicates that 26,000 to 30,000 Iraqi civilians have died since the war started in March 2003.
Of those, about 9,000 are reported to have been killed by the US military itself. Lt Col Barry Venable, a Pentagon spokesman, said that coalition forces did not respond to every insurgent attack and so some civilian deaths would have gone unrecorded.
Telegraph Group Limited 2005.