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Thursday, August 05, 2004

Liberated

A few months after the war started in March 2003, there were stories saying that reports indicated approximately 10,000 civilian deaths from the war. And even though the killing has continued pretty much non-stop, and picked up substantially since April, it has still been common to see 10,000 as the number of civilian deaths in press reports. Finally, someone has updated these stories, although they're still obviously chasing the story. From the WSWS:
An Iraqi political organization, the People’s Kifah or Struggle Against Hegemony, told the Arab network Al Jazeera on the weekend that it had documented more than 37,000 civilian deaths in Iraq in the seven months from the start of the US war on March 20, 2003, through October 2003.
With hundreds or thousands having been killed in Falloujah, Najaf and all over Iraq, the number may be approaching 100,000 by now. And that still doesn't count Iraqi soldiers, who committed the crime of defending their country against foreign invaders:
The estimates of Iraqi military deaths during the invasion range from approximately 10,000 to as many as 45,000.
I would hazard to guess that many of these casualties, especially the soldiers, have been buried in mass graves. (In the first Gulf War, Iraqi soldiers were bulldozed under in their trenches, and not all of them were dead when it happened.)