Here is the story as reported in LA Times (mentioned in Malik’s post):
**Baghdad’s Death Toll Assessed **
A Times hospital survey finds that at least 1,700 civilians were killed and more than 8,000 injured in Iraq’s capital during the war and aftermath.
By Laura King, Times Staff Writer
BAGHDAD — At least 1,700 Iraqi civilians died and more than 8,000 were injured in Baghdad during the war and in the weeks afterward, according to a Los Angeles Times survey of records from 27 hospitals in the capital and its outlying districts.
In addition, undocumented civilian deaths in Baghdad number at least in the hundreds and could reach 1,000, according to Islamic burial societies and humanitarian groups that are trying to trace those missing in the conflict.
More than a month after the war’s end, no official tally of civilian casualties has emerged. Amid the disorder attending the collapse of Saddam Hussein’s regime and the nascent American military occupation, one might never be made — although such a reckoning could play an important role, in the eyes of a watching world, in weighing the conflict’s moral costs.
The Times’ count of civilian casualties spanned the five weeks beginning March 20, a period that includes the U.S. bombardment and subsequent ground battle for the Iraqi capital. It also includes fatalities from unexploded ordnance during the first 2 1/2 weeks after the city fell on April 9 and deaths as a result of injuries suffered earlier during the fighting. The survey covered all the large hospitals and most smaller specialty facilities in the city center, as well as those in remote districts within the municipal boundaries.
Those victims included in the toll died as a direct result of the conflict, but not necessarily at American hands. Medical officials said many civilians — even a rough estimate of the numbers is impossible — were killed by exploding Iraqi ammunition stored in residential neighborhoods, by falling Iraqi antiaircraft rounds that had been aimed at American warplanes, or by Iraqi fire directed at American troops.
U.S. military officials said repeatedly throughout the war that all possible care was being taken to avoid civilian casualties, and expressed regret over those that occurred. The American administration in Iraq, which is struggling to restore basic services and control street violence, has no plans to try to tally the civilian dead.
“We have no way of verifying independently whether people who were killed were civilians or not civilians,” Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. Dave Lapan said Friday.
Perhaps the greatest obstacle to obtaining an accurate count of civilian deaths is distinguishing between Iraqi soldiers and civilians. In the waning days of the war, many Iraqi fighters continued to man their positions, but they dressed in civilian clothes and discarded their dog tags, according to accounts from witnesses in the city at the time.
But even soldiers who shed their uniforms and threw away their weapons often continued to carry some form of identification. The hospital figures did not consistently separate out men between the ages of 18 and 35, one common approach to limiting the inclusion of soldiers among the tally of civilians. But most said if they found any indication of military affiliation, they noted it in their patient records.
“Some of them would murmur to us they were soldiers, because they wanted us to be able to help find their families if they died,” said Dr. Mahmoud Kubisi, a general surgeon at the 450-bed Karameh Teaching Hospital in the city center.More than a month after the war’s end, Baghdad bears ubiquitous reminders of its dead. Hand-lettered death notices — black banners printed in yellow and white — flutter from trees, walls and lampposts, growing more faded each day. "In the name of God the merciful, and in accordance with God’s will " most begin, going on to list the victim’s name and briefly describe how he or she died.
For each of the conflict’s dead, grief has spread widening ripples through the capital, where about one-fifth of Iraq’s 24 million people live.
“Our home is an empty place,” said 72-year-old Saler Hamzeh Ali Moussawi, 72, the patriarch of a family from the south of Baghdad that lost 11 of its members, ranging in age from 16 to 50, in a single catastrophic blow April 7 when their minivan was apparently hit by a U.S. tank shell. Family members recovered the badly decomposed bodies four days later.
“We who are left are like wild animals — all we can do is cry out and cry out,” said Moussawi, his lined face contorted with sorrow.
Most of Baghdad’s hospitals managed to stay open throughout the fighting and its aftermath, although looting forced about half a dozen to temporarily close. As the dead and wounded poured in, conditions became more and more chaotic.
“The whole hospital was the emergency room,” Dr. Bashir Mohammed Bashir, director of emergency medicine at Kindi General Hospital. “The nature of injuries was so severe — one body without a head, someone else with their abdomen ripped open Human beings are so frail in the face of these weapons of war.”
Baghdad’s many smaller specialty hospitals — for eye surgery, neurology, obstetrics and plastic surgery — were pressed into wartime service as emergency clinics. Dr. Mahmoud Jasim Ali, an obstetrician at Habibi Hospital, recounted delivering a baby by caesarean section, and barely waiting to hear her first cry before rushing to attend to a screaming man whose arm had been blown off.
In some cases, records at Baghdad hospitals were incomplete. In others, details were withheld by Iraqi authorities, or by what passes for authority in the power vacuum left by the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime.
In the poor district formerly called Saddam City but now known as Sadr City, permission from a powerful Shiite Muslim sheik was required for a journalist to visit the neighborhood’s four hospitals. At one of them, statisticians reported that the sheik’s aides had already confiscated the records.
At Mansour Hospital, in the sprawling four-hospital complex known as Medical City in central Baghdad, doctors claimed that U.S. troops had removed their casualty records. American soldiers in the area confirmed that they had confiscated some weapons but denied seizing hospital documents.
The statistical departments of several Baghdad hospitals were left in disarray by looters who swept through the city after its fall. However, hospital staff members managed to reassemble data based on hurried notes made by emergency doctors and nurses, patient charts and tallies kept by morgue attendants.
In as many cases as possible, The Times examined original handwritten records — stacks of death certificates and long lists of carefully inked names and personal details in the oversized ledgers that serve as each hospital’s book of the dead.
While very few Baghdad hospitals had computerized files, meticulous record-keeping was the norm in Hussein’s Iraq, which for decades sustained an overblown bureaucracy. Iraqi death certificates, to be filled out in quadruplicate, require detailed personal information about the deceased and the manner of death.
But even an ingrained national habit of careful documentation couldn’t stand up entirely to war’s chaos. Some hospitals ran out of death certificates. Exhausted doctors, lurching from one maimed patient to the next, sometimes had time for little more than a quick notation.
“We were working day and night,” said Dr. Abbas Timimi, director of Abu Ghraib General Hospital on the city’s western outskirts. “With so many people so badly hurt, we felt so much pressure to be treating patients instead of filling out forms. But we’d always scribble something.”
Doctors and nurses knew that for survivors seeking dead relatives, any scrap of information would help. At one hospital after another, officials showed bags of neatly labeled personal effects of the dead: family photographs, prayer beads, bloodstained identity cards, crumpled banknotes.
“Unclaimed No. 21,” read a simple handwritten note in the death records at Thawra General Hospital in Sadr City. “She is a woman, middle-aged She is a little bit fat. She is wearing a green housedress, and she is missing some teeth.” On the basis of that brief description, the body of Sadiha Joumey, 42, was later identified by her family and taken away for burial.
Not included in The Times’ count were dozens of deaths that doctors indirectly attributed to the conflict. Those cases included pregnant women who died of complications while giving birth at home because they could not get to a hospital and chronically ill people, such as cardiac or dialysis patients, who were unable to obtain needed care while the fighting raged.
“Even once the fighting stopped, our most sophisticated operating theaters, in which we could perform open-heart surgery, had been destroyed by the looters,” said Waseem Khalid, a prominent cardiac surgeon at Ibn Bidar Hospital for Heart Disease. “I knew I was sending some of my patients home to die.”
