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September 25, 2004

US Kills More Civilians than Insurgents

More Iraqis have died since April 5th of this year than died in the September 11 attack. Most of them have been civilians and more have been killed by the US than by the insurgents.

As this Knight-Ridder story details:

Operations by U.S. and multinational forces and Iraqi police are killing twice as many Iraqis -- most of them civilians -- as attacks by insurgents, according to statistics compiled by the Iraqi Health Ministry and obtained exclusively by Knight Ridder.

According to the ministry, the interim Iraqi government recorded 3,487 Iraqi deaths in 15 of the country's 18 provinces from April 5 -- when the ministry began compiling the data -- until Sept. 19. Of those, 328 were women and children. Another 13,720 Iraqis were injured, the ministry said.

Iraqi officials said the statistics proved that U.S. airstrikes intended for insurgents also were killing large numbers of innocent civilians. Some say these casualties are undermining popular acceptance of the American-backed interim government.

This is both inhumane and stupid. How can we justify a war based on avenging the murder of civilians by killing more civilians. And what is sick is many of the victims are children:

The Health Ministry statistics indicate that more children have been killed around Ramadi and Fallujah than in Baghdad, though those cities together have only one-fifth of the Iraqi capital's population.

According to the statistics, 59 children were killed in Anbar province -- a hotbed of the Sunni Muslim insurgency that includes the cities of Ramadi and Fallujah -- compared with 56 children in Baghdad. The ministry defines children as anyone younger than 12.

The cravenness of the media is that they won't show the pictures of these murdered children.

Posted by Nathan at September 25, 2004 11:19 AM

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