It’s a lot worse than reported

Number of US soldiers killed depends on who's counting

by Kevin Potvin <kpotvin@republic-news.org>

According to reports compiled by Western media, the number of US soldiers killed in Iraq in June amounted to 77—the seventh-worst month for the Americans in their 28-month-long occupation of that country. But according to Iraqi media sources, at least 1,017 US soldiers were killed in Iraq in June, and possibly many more.

The Mafkarat al-Islam news agency has been for over a year generating nearly daily reports gathered by correspondents located throughout Iraq. These reports have been collated, translated, and distributed on-line by The Free Arab Voice, an all-volunteer and independent newsletter published “only in cyberspace once every few weeks.” There are 327 daily Mafkarat al-Islam reports of Iraqi resistance incidents available at their site.

The reports provide brief descriptions of encounters between US occupation forces and Iraqi resistance fighters, giving exact locations and times, precise descriptions of equipment involved, numbers of casualties on both sides (where those numbers are available), and the source of the information, usually eye witnesses. The reports are seldom embellished and none alone seem exaggerated. It is the sheer number of incidents that add up to the much higher rate of death of Americans than is otherwise reported. Western media reporters by contrast are by and large confined to Green Zone hotels in central Baghdad, and they have few opportunities to attend to sites of clashes and fewer chances to talk to eye witnesses when they do.

Noting that the number of dead Americans in these reports adds up to at least 13 times more than what appears in Western media reports, it is fair to ask, are the numbers of casualties compiled by Mafkarat al-Islam more accurate? In these reports are details also of wounded US forces and casualties among Iraqi government forces. These numbers correspond to those released by the Pentagon and reported in Western media remarkably closely. Also matching up closely are the number of serious encounters of any kind as reported by both sides. The only number that is wildly divergent has to do with the number of US dead. It happens also to be by far the most sensitive number for the US military and its necessary public support among American citizens back home.

The Pentagon has admitted that the number of attacks of any kind launched by what they call the insurgency is much higher than what has been characterized in the Western press, which had been suggesting 20 attacks per day was the average. Currently the number of attacks upon US forces, now admits the Pentagon, range between 80 and 120 per day throughout the country. The Pentagon has also recently admitted that the number of wounded US soldiers is far higher than had previously been reported to Congress. Earlier, Congress was told about 23,000 soldiers required Veterans Hospital care of some sort since returning from Iraq. The number they now admit is more like 103,000.

Mafkarat al-Islam ’s reports going back to January seem to indicate a death rate among US soldiers averaging around 31 per day. Those deaths seem to occur at an average rate of about three per reported attack. Each day, there is an average of about ten or so attacks reported by Mafkarat al-Islam. Attacks that do not cause US casualties do not seem to merit coverage.

If there are about 80 to 120 attacks per day, as the Pentagon admits, it seems reasonable to accept that ten of them, or about ten per cent, would successfully kill or wound US forces. An average of three deaths per successful attack on troop-carrying Humvees or supply convoys—which seems to account for the bulk of the targets reported—also seems a likely number. Under these circumstances, about 31 killed US soldiers a day reported by eye witnesses and local reporters seems a more likely number than the two per day reported by western reporters locked down in their hotels in Baghdad’s Green Zone, those who talk only to official US occupation sources who, if the numbers were much higher, would have an interest in obscuring the truth.

If Mafkarat al-Islam is accurate, US forces have suffered something like 5,600 deaths in Iraq since the beginning of this year alone. The rate is higher now than during 2004, but a scan of reports throughout that year allow a loose estimate of perhaps 6,000 US soldiers killed throughout 2004 and 2,000 throughout 2003. Western sources claim the US has so far suffered about 1,800 deaths since waging war on Iraq in April 2003. Reports compiled by Mafkarat al-Islam seem to indicate the number could instead be as high as 13,000—or much higher, since attacks on US bases in Iraq, which seem to occur daily, produce no witness accounts of US casualties, for obvious reasons.

The size of the US deployment to Iraq has remained for some time around 150,000, and US president George Bush has recently indicated he will not seek to raise or lower that number any time soon. Based on information supplied by US veterans associations and by the US department of defense, the total number of US soldiers who have rotated through Iraq since the beginning of hostilities in April 2003 is now just over 500,000. (Many have served two deployments, some even three). If Mafkarat al-Islam’s numbers are accurate, then 2.6 per cent of those so far deployed to Iraq have been killed in combat there.

That rate compares with the overall rate of about 1.5 per cent of those deployed to Vietnam between 1964 and 1975 getting killed, over which time a total of just over three million Americans deployed to that country. During the years of peak US ground forces deployments between 1966 and 1971, however, the ratio of deaths to deployments rises to about 2.9 per cent, a number remarkably close to that found in Iraq today, if Mafkarat al-Islam’s reports are accurate. But if the Pentagon and Western media’s reports are accurate, the ratio is as low as 0.4 per cent—a suspiciously low figure given the emphasis in this conflict on minimal numbers of deployments, and the vicious, all-out guerilla nature of it.

One may doubt Mafkarat al-Islam’s reports by pointing out that there has not been so many thousands of US coffins seen returning to the US. But in fact few of the 1,800 coffins that comprise official Pentagon reports have actually been seen. The US has barred the press and photographers from any scene where returned bodies can be viewed and there has been no publicly viewed burial ceremonies in any official US military gravesites.

One might counter that if 13,000 soldiers have been killed instead of the 1,800 reported, there would be about 11,000 more grieving families popping up in newspapers and local news shows. However, no one to The Republic’s knowledge has tried to count the number of families stricken in this way. There may well be several more thousand grieving families than anyone supposes.

Furthermore, the US military has often deployed non-US citizens dressed in US military outfits, in exchange for a Green Card if they make it back to the US alive. The non-American families of those fatalities may not know the fate of their family members, and their grief may not be known to any US press. A non-US citizen was the first casualty of the US attack on Iraq. No official sources give the total number of non-US citizens deployed in US uniforms to Iraq, nor is it possible to learn their rate of death. Queries to the Pentagon by The Republic have not been answered.

Given the US military’s penchant for hiding numbers, it is not wild speculation to suppose that accounts supplied by eye witnesses to locally trusted reporters scattered throughout the country may in fact be more accurate than those supplied by the US military to embedded or protected Western reporters. Recall that the US military does not even bother to pretend to count enemy casualties, provides no estimates of civilian casualties, has a known history of conflating the two numbers in conflicts such as the one in Vietnam, and in fact has laid siege to hospitals and arrested doctors in cities where major attacks are under way for the expressed purpose of preventing those hospitals and doctors from reporting numbers of casualties to the press.

Also in this conflict, the US has hidden prison cells from inspectors from the Red Cross and the Red Crescent, has misled the US Congress on the numbers of wounded, and has downplayed reports of murders, rapes, wonton destruction of housing, and tortures. Western media in Iraq have pointedly expressed their frustration at getting out of their hotels and the Green Zone to check out the stories fed to them by the US military. This conflict has seen a record high rate of casualties among the media, and it’s both sides who have been routinely taking Western reporters out.

In short, this conflict is much worse for the Americans and for the Iraqis than any reading of the Western press would lead one to think. At a current rate of 80 to 120 attacks a day throughout the country leading to an average of 31 deaths and perhaps 100 wounded per day, this conflict is as bloody for the Americans as the Korean conflict was in the early 1950s, where 30 US soldiers were killed and 95 were wounded on average per day. Revealingly, the cost of the present conflict in constant dollars has just last month surpassed the cost of the Korean conflict, whose length in time will also be matched soon in December of this year.

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