U.S. military now quietly tracking Iraqi deaths / Pentagon begins to acknowledge toll taken by insurgents

2005-10-30 04:00:00 PDT Baghdad -- In the first public disclosure that the U.S. military is tracking some of the deaths of Iraqi civilians, the military has released rough figures for Iraqis who have been killed or wounded by insurgents since Jan. 1 last year.

The estimate of dead and wounded Iraqi civilians and security forces was provided by the Pentagon in a report to Congress this month. It appeared without fanfare in a single bar graph on Page 23 of the document.

But it was significant because the military had previously avoided virtually all public discussion of the issue.

The count is incomplete -- it provides daily partial averages of deaths and injuries of all Iraqis at the hands of insurgents, in attacks such as bombings, and suicide strikes. No figures were provided for the number of Iraqi civilians killed by U.S.-led forces.

Still, it shows that the military appears to have a far more accurate picture of the toll of the war than it has been willing to acknowledge.

"They have begun to realize that when you focus only on the U.S., it gives the impression that the U.S. doesn't care about Iraqis," said Anthony Cordesman, a military expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a research group in Washington. "In these kinds of political battles, you need to count your allies, not just yourself."

According to the graph, Iraqi civilians and security forces were killed and wounded by insurgents at a rate of about 26 a day early in 2004, and at a rate of about 40 a day later that year. The rate increased in 2005 to about 51 a day, and by the end of August had jumped to about 63 a day.

Extrapolating the daily averages over the months from Jan. 1, 2004, to Sept. 16 of this year results in a total of 25,902 Iraqi civilians and security forces killed and wounded by insurgents.

According to an analysis by Hamit Dardagan, who compiles statistics for Iraq Body Count (www.iraqbodycount.net), which tracks civilian deaths, about 3 Iraqis are wounded in the war for each 1 who dies. Given that ratio, the total Iraqi death toll from insurgent violence would be about 6,475, based on extrapolations of the military's figures.

"It strikes me as low," said Marc Garlasco, senior military analyst at Human Rights Watch in New York. More Iraqis are dying now in insurgent attacks than at U.S. checkpoints or in U.S. military operations, he said, but the numbers of Iraqis killed by Americans would still add to the overall total.

The tally is lower than the 11,163 deaths of Iraqi civilians in the war during the same period counted by Dardagan's group, which draws its data from reports of deaths and injuries by various news outlets. It is also lower than figures released by Iraq's Interior Ministry showing that 8,175 Iraqi civilians and police officers had been killed by insurgents from August 2004 through May 2005.

Even so, the tallies show that the military has been recording Iraqi deaths by insurgents with some regularity since the first months after the invasion.

The casualties were compiled from reports filed by coalition military units after they responded to attacks, said Lt. Col. Barry Venable, a Pentagon spokesman, in answers to questions from the New York Times sent by e-mail.

The numbers are spotty, he said, because forces do not respond to every attack, and initial on-site counts are often incomplete. The count did not separate the dead from the wounded or differentiate between civilians and police officers or soldiers.

"These incident reports are not intended to provide -- and do not provide -- a comprehensive account of Iraqi casualties," Venable said in his e-mail message. The information in the reports shows "trends in casualties resulting from insurgent attacks."

The report, "Measuring Stability and Security in Iraq," was the second of the quarterly accountings required by Congress this year. The first accounting, issued in July, was criticized by some members of Congress for providing too few details about the effort in Iraq. The second report, which included the Iraqi casualty figures, was twice as long as the first and was posted on the Department of Defense Web site on Oct. 13.

Venable said information on civilians was included in the October report "as a result of specific questions posed by congressional staffers during briefings."

"We were very interested in it," said Timothy Rieser, an aide to Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., who sponsored the amendment to the fiscal year 2006 Defense Authorization Bill that calls for casualty details. "After denying that they keep these statistics, it gives the Congress something concrete to ask them about," Rieser said.

The bar graph was made public, but the data underlying it were not, so the figures used for this article were derived from measuring the bars. Venable said the information had been classified because it could allow insurgents to assess the effectiveness of their attacks. Dardagan questioned the secrecy, citing regular releases of American deaths.

"We now know that the U.S. military does keep records of Iraqi civilian deaths," Dardagan said. "There seems to be no obvious reason for keeping them a secret."

There have been some separate attempts at tallying Iraqis killed by U.S. troops. Mohamed al-Musawi, director of the Iraqi Human Rights Organization, said in an interview last week that he had documented 589 Iraqis killed by Americans in Baghdad since 2003.

Previously, the military said its records were so incomplete that it would not release any data. In July, Lt. Col. Steven Boylan, a spokesman for the U.S. military in Baghdad, said, "We do not have the ability to get accurate data. We do not have visibility all over Iraq in every location."

U.S. military officials have said attacks against Americans and Iraqis have been averaging 85 a day for much of the past year.

It is not clear what proportion of attacks U.S. forces respond to, but Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, a spokesman for the U.S. military in Iraq, said Thursday that forces respond "whenever we can."