Doug Lorimer
May was the second deadliest month for the US occupation forces in Iraq so far this year, with 72 US troops killed. This took the total number of US troops killed in Iraq since the war began in March 2003 to 1657, according to a count kept by Associated Press.
On May 20, General Michael Rochelle, chief of the US Army Recruiting Command, revealed that the war had resulted in 8000 dead or severely wounded US soldiers.
The total number of Iraqi deaths since the war began is unknown, largely because the Pentagon refuses to count Iraqi civilian deaths caused by US forces.
"We don't do body counts", General Tommy Franks, who commanded US troops during the invasion of Iraq, stated in 2002.
However, over the past year, in an attempt to convince the US public that it is "winning" its war against the resistance to the occupation, the US military has released figures on the number of "insurgents" it claims to have killed in each major battle. But it still does not count the number of civilians who die as a result of its operations. Nor does Washington's puppet Iraqi government, which only announces figures for the number of civilians it says have been killed by the anti-occupation resistance.
Richard Kohn, a professor of military history at the University of North Carolina, told the May 12 San Francisco Chronicle that for the US government, "it's more politically advantageous not to count and not to know". But he says he suspects the US military keeps a general count of Iraqi casualties. "It would be hard for me to believe the military doesn't keep some sense of that. You need to know how much havoc you're wreaking in a county if you're trying to accomplish something in that country."
A report issued on May 18 by the Massachusetts-based Project on Defense Alternatives, Vicious Circle: The Dynamics of Occupation and Resistance in Iraq, calculated that 30,000 Iraqis have died as a direct result of combat operations by all sides in the Iraq war, with 75% of them having been killed by US-led "coalition" operations.
The report provides a summary of what large numbers of Iraqis face every day at the hands of the US-led occupiers: "Constant foreign military patrols — about 12,000 per week; ubiquitous (and too often deadly) vehicle check-points; raids — 8000 in total since May 2003; and citizen round-ups — 80,000 detained since April 2003."
From Green Left Weekly, June 8, 2005.
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