Africa Speaks Reasoning Forum

 Counting the Bodies
     by James Ridgeway
     Village Voice | Mondo Washington
     Publication Date September 3 - 9, 2003
     Hard to Keep Track of the Dead in Iraq
     Amid increasing suspicions that the U.S. media have been underestimating Iraqi casualties, here are the latest more or less reliable figures culled from several sources, including the government:
     Iraq Body Count (iraqbodycount.net) reported that the number of civilian deaths in Iraq ranges from 6,113 to 7,830. Military.com reports that as of August 28 a total of 281 U.S. soldiers have been killed since the start of the invasion-that includes 143 since major fighting was declared "over" on May 1. The Iraq Coalition Casualty Count (lunaville.org/warcasualties/summary.aspx), based on tallies from Centcom, the Defense Department, and the British Ministry of Defence, shows that, as of August 27, 281 U.S. soldiers, 50 British soldiers, and two "other" coalition soldiers have been reported killed. The estimated wounded? 1,212.
     But by far the most interesting and quite possibly most realistic report comes by way of Jude Wanniski, the supply-side economist and ex-Wall Street Journal reporter who has struck up a correspondence with Mohammad al-Obaidi, an Iraqi doctor living in Britain. Al-Obaidi coordinates the small Iraqi Freedom Party, which favors free enterprise and is both anti-Saddam and anti-U.S. Al-Obaidi tells the Voice that members of his family have been tortured and killed by Saddam's secret police, and others have been killed in American air and ground attacks. Al-Obaidi, whose brother is a retired general now living in Iraq, says he has no ties with any intelligence service and has nothing to do with the American stooge Ahmed Chalabi.
     Al-Obaidi told Wanniski that "hundreds of our party's cadre" spent five weeks interviewing undertakers, hospital officials, and ordinary citizens in all of Iraq (except for what's controlled by the Kurds) and came up with a total figure of 37,137 civilians killed since the beginning of the invasion, 6,103 of them in Baghdad. Those figures, according to al-Obaidi, do not include members of unofficial militias, paramilitary groups, or Saddam's Fedayeen units.

By ROBERT FISK
The Independent

In Iraq, they go for the jugular: two weeks ago, the UN's top man, last week one of the most influential Shia Muslim clerics. As they used to say in the Lebanese war, if enough people want you dead, you'll die.

So who wanted Ayatollah Mohamed Bakr al-Hakim dead? Or, more to the point, who would not care if he died? Well, yes, there's the famous "Saddam remnants" which the al-Hakim family are already blaming for the Najaf massacre. He was tortured by Saddam's men and, after al-Hakim had gone into his Iranian exile, Saddam executed one of his relatives each year in a vain attempt to get him to come back. Then there's the Kuwaitis or the Saudis who certainly don't want his Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq to achieve any kind of "Islamic revolution" north of their border.

There are neo-conservatives aplenty in the United States who would never have trusted al-Hakim, despite his connections to the Iraqi Interim Council that the Americans run in Baghdad. Then there's the Shias.

Only a couple of months ago, I remember listening to al-Hakim preaching at Friday prayers, demanding an end to the Anglo-American occupation but speaking of peace and demanding even that women should join the new Iraqi army. "Don't think we all support this man," a worshipper said to me.

Al-Hakim also had a bad reputation for shopping his erstwhile Iraqi colleagues to Iranian intelligence.

Then there's Muqtada Sadr, the young--and much less learned--cleric whose martyred father has given him a cloak of heroism among younger Shias and who has long condemned "collaboration" with the American occupiers of Iraq; less well-known is his own organisation's quiet collaboration with Saddam's regime before the Anglo-American invasion.

Deeper than this singular dispute run the angry rivers of theological debate in the seminaries of Najaf, which never accepted the idea of velayat faqi--theological rule--espoused by Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran. Al-Hakim had called Khomeini, and his successor Ayatollah Khamanei, the "living Imam". Al-Hakim also compared himself to the martyred imams Ali and Hussein, whose family had also been killed during the first years of Muslim history. This was a trite, even faintly sacrilegious way of garnering support.

The people of Najaf, for the most part, don't believe in "living Imams" of this kind. But in the end, the bloodbath at Najaf--and the murder of Mohamed al-Hakim--will be seen for what it is: yet further proof that the Americans cannot, or will not, control Iraq. General Ricardo Sanchez, the US commander in Iraq, said only 24 hours earlier that he needed no more troops. Clearly, he does if he wishes to stop the appalling violence.

For what is happening, in the Sunni heartland around Baghdad and now in the burgeoning Shia nation to the south, is not just the back-draft of an invasion or even a growing guerrilla war against occupation. It is the start of a civil war in Iraq that will consume the entire nation if its new rulers do not abandon their neo-conservative fantasies and implore the world to share the future of the country with them.

http://www.counterpunch.org/fisk09022003.html