Far Greater Death Toll in Iraq
Equivalent of Five 9/11 Deathtolls Just In Recent Days
MER - MiddleEast.Org - Washington - 27 Feb:
As usual the information coming from the Pentagon and State Department,
and from the many who work for them either overtly and covertly, is
again unreliable and deceptive, off by an order of magnitude in
fact. After independent investigations it appears the
Americans, and their associated regime in Baghdad, tremendously
downplayed the actual death and destruction toll in the last week in
Iraq since the bombing of the Golden Dome. Indeed,
adjusting for population size, it is as if in just the past week alone
Iraq has suffered deaths amounting to five 9/11s! This is
what the American invasion/occupation has brought to Iraq -- far more
death, far more suffering, far more destruction -- a country on the
verge of exploding into an even greater orgy of civil war and chaos.
Iraq Death Toll Higher Than First Thought
Violence Unleashed Last Week Killed More Than 1,300
By Ellen Knickmeyer and Bassam Sebti
Washington Post Foreign Service
BAGHDAD,
Feb. 27 -- Grisly attacks and other sectarian violence unleashed by
last week's bombing of a Shiite shrine have killed more than 1,300
Iraqis, making the past few days the deadliest of the war outside major
U.S. offensives, according to Baghdad's main morgue. The toll was more
than three times higher than the figure previously reported by the U.S.
military and the news media.
Hundreds of unclaimed dead lay at
the morgue at midday Monday -- sprawled, blood-caked men who had been
shot, knifed, garroted or apparently suffocated by the plastic bags
still over their heads. Many of the bodies had their hands still bound
-- and many of them had wound up at the morgue after what their
families said was their abduction by the Mahdi Army, the Shiite militia
of cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.
"After he came back from the evening
prayer, the Mahdi Army broke into his house and asked him, 'Are you
Khalid the Sunni infidel?' " one man at the morgue said, relating what
were the last hours of his cousin, according to other relatives. "He
replied 'yes' and then they took him away."
Aides to Sadr denied the allegations, calling them part of a smear campaign by unspecified political rivals.
By
Monday, violence between Sunnis and Shiites appeared to have eased. As
Iraqi security forces patrolled, American troops offered measured
support, in hopes of allowing the Iraqis to take charge and prevent
further carnage.
But at the morgue, where the floor was crusted
with dried blood, the evidence of the damage already done was clear.
Iraqis arrived throughout the day, seeking family members and neighbors
among the contorted bodies.
"And they say there is no sectarian war?" demanded one man. "What do you call this?''
The
brothers of one missing man arrived, searching for a body. Their hunt
ended on the concrete floor, provoking sobs of mourning: "Why did you
kill him?" "He was unarmed!" "Oh, my brother! Oh, my brother!"
Morgue
officials said they had logged more than 1,300 dead since Wednesday --
the day the Shiites' gold-domed Askariya shrine was bombed --
photographing, numbering, and tagging the bodies as they came in over
the nights and days of retaliatory raids.
The Statistics
Department of the Iraqi police put the nationwide toll at 1,020 since
Wednesday, but that figure was based on paperwork that is sometimes
delayed before reaching police headquarters. The majority of the dead
had been killed after being taken away by armed men, police said.
The
disclosure of the death tolls followed accusations by the U.S. military
and later Iraqi officials that the news media had exaggerated the
violence between Shiites and Sunnis over the past few days.
The
bulk of the previously known deaths were caused by bombings and other
large-scale attacks. But the scene at the morgue and accounts related
by relatives indicated that most of the bloodletting came at the hands
of executioners.
"They killed him just because he was a Sunni,"
one young man at the morgue said of his 32-year-old neighbor, whose
body he was retrieving.
Much of the violence has centered around mosques, many of which were taken over by Shiite gunmen, bombed or burned.
In the Shiite holy city of Najaf, aides to Sadr denied any role in the killings.
"These
groups wore black clothes like the Mahdi Army to make the people say
that the Shiites kidnapped and killed them," said Riyadh al-Nouri, a
close aide to Sadr.
Sahib al-Amiri, another close aide, said,
"Some political party accused [Sadr's political party] and the Mahdi
Army because they considered us as competitive to them. So they
recruited criminals to kill Shiites and Sunnis."
After
Wednesday's mosque attack in Samarra, Sadr and other Shiite clerics
called on their armed followers to deploy to protect shrines across
Iraq.
Clutching rocket-propelled grenades and automatic rifles,
the militias rolled out of their Baghdad base of Sadr City. Residents
of several neighborhoods reported them on patrol or in control of
mosques. U.S.-backed Iraqi security forces did not appear to challenge
the militias, which are officially outlawed.
Sunni leaders
charged that more than 100 Sunni mosques were burned, fired upon or
bombed in the retaliatory violence after the attack on the Samarra
mosque.
Iraqi officials, at the urging of Sunni leaders, imposed
what became a round-the-clock curfew in Baghdad to try to quell the
violence.
Sunnis speaking at the morgue said many of the dead had
been taken away at night, when security forces were supposed to have
been enforcing the curfew.
By Monday, the reported violence had
subsided. Four mortar rounds hit a Shiite neighborhood of Baghdad,
killing four people, news agencies reported. More mortar attacks boomed
in other parts of the capital.
Also Monday, Iraq's interim
government lifted the round-the-clock curfew in Baghdad. The new curfew
ordered residents inside from 8 p.m. to 6 a.m.
Residents rushed
out of their homes to refill gas tanks and kitchen shelves. Lines at
gas stations stretched for miles and sometimes clogged both sides of
highways. One motorist in the line was seen clutching a blanket and
pillow, apparently anticipating an overnight wait for gas.
Making their way through the traffic were a few cars with plastic-wrapped corpses in crude wooden coffins strapped to the roofs.
In
two hours at the morgue on Monday, families brought in two more victims
of the violence to receive death certificates. Other families carried
away 10 other dead. Most of the victims were Sunni.
At the blue
steel doors of the morgue, dozens of more bloody bodies could be seen
on the floor or on gurneys. Two hundred still were unidentified and
unclaimed, morgue workers said.
Claiming the dead has become
automated. Morgue workers directed families to a barred window in the
narrow courtyard outside the main entrance. A computer screen angled to
face the window flashed the contorted, staring faces of the dead: men
shot in the mouth, men shot in the head, men covered with blood, men
with bindings twisted around their necks.
Men and a few women in black abayas pressed up to the window's black bars in the sweet-smelling reek of the bodies inside.
"What neighborhood?'' a morgue worker asked one waiting man.
"Adhamiyah,'' the man said, naming a predominantly Sunni neighborhood.
Tapping at the key board, the morgue worker fast-forwarded through the scores of tortured faces.
"Criminals. How can you kill another human for nothing?" someone clutching the bars asked.
"Good news, we found the body," another man called out. "We found him."
Special
correspondents K.I. Ibrahim in Baghdad, Saad Sarhan in Najaf,
correspondent Nelson Hernandez and other Washington Post staff
contributed to this report.