WORLD> Middle East
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WORLD> Middle East
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Iraq study: Executions are leading cause of death
(Agencies)
Updated: 2009-04-16 14:08 That compared with 16,922, or 27 percent, who died in bombings, most of them in suicide attacks. The figures were similar to those recorded by the AP. While the study didn't assign blame for the killings, death squads largely run by Shiite militias were believed to be behind many of the bullet-riddled bodies that turned up by the dozens on the streets of Baghdad and other cities — often stripped of any identification.
The authors said the number of execution-style killings is likely to be higher because it excluded Iraq Body Count's morgue figures. The morgue numbers were omitted because the specific weapon used could not be determined in those cases. Nor did they attempt to speculate how many missing people could be dead. Although such killings continue, the numbers of bodies found every day have dropped to the single digits since the US troop surge and a cease-fire called by the main militia leader, Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, in August 2007. The drop in violence is also due in part to the fact that many formerly mixed neighborhoods in Baghdad have been effectively segregated after the minority sect was purged by the death squads. Baghdad has since become a maze of concrete walls and checkpoints aimed at ensuring security. Marc Garlasco, a senior military analyst with the New York-based Human Rights Watch, blamed the sectarian violence and insurgency that followed the ouster of Saddam Hussein on poor postwar planning by the United States. "It bears out what we have known for some time now — that there was a massive shift in the 2004 time frame from civilian casualties caused by US and multinational forces to the insurgency," he said. Only 4 percent of the Iraqi deaths included in the study, or 2,363, were a result of US airstrikes, which frequently targeted suspected insurgents hiding in houses. But 46 percent of the victims whose gender could be determined were female and 39 percent were children. The authors caution that those percentages may be inflated "because the media may tend to specifically identify female and young victims more readily than male adults among the dead." The airstrikes also caused the largest number of civilian deaths in individual attacks, with an average number of 17 people killed in bombs dropped by warplanes, compared with an average of 16 people killed by suicide attackers on foot, the figures showed. Garlasco, who was not involved in the study, said that reflected a grim reality. "The airstrike data is very similar to Afghanistan in that when civilians are killed in an airstrike it tends to be a significant number," he said. "Air power can be a very discriminating force, but when mistakes are made civilians pay and they pay big."
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