Victims of circumstance
The U.S. faces some tough choices as the civilian toll grows in Iraq
Inside his Baghdad office, Iraq's deputy health minister scans a tally of Iraqis killed and injured in the last months. He whistles under his breath. "It's terrifying. It's terrible," says Ammar al-Saffar as he looks up from the paper and shakes his head. "A year ago it was difficult for me to look at the shattered body of a victim. Now, it's part of my routine."
The sheet in al-Saffar's hands shows 1,811 dead from June 10 to September 10, including 516 Iraqis civilians killed in terror attacks and 1,295 Iraqis dead as the result of military clashes between insurgents and Americans. To that count al-Saffar will have to add the toll of the last days: 13 people, including children and a journalist, killed in Baghdad during a September 12 clash over a disabled Bradley fighting vehicle; 67 civilians killed in a weekend of terror attacks; 20 Iraqis, at least some civilians, killed in a September 13 airstrike on Fallujah; and 47 dead from a car bomb outside a police station the next day. The days go by; the list grows longer.
Amassed from reports by the health department's provincial offices and the press, the official numbers are surely incomplete. And, of course, it is nearly impossible for Americans to tell who among the dead were members of the insurgency and who were innocents. But Iraqi officials--and the Iraqi public--have no doubt that between growing numbers of terrorist attacks and collateral damage from American strikes, civilians are dying at a faster pace than ever before in the conflict.
It is hard to overstate the problem these deaths pose for American officials when it comes to winning Iraqi hearts and minds. The accidental killing of women, children, and bystanders has repeatedly angered Iraqis and is turning the public against America and fueling the insurgency. At the same time, the insurgency's growing strength has thrust the war back to the fore in the U.S. presidential race. Last week, details leaked of the most recent National Intelligence Estimate, which forecast a troubled future for Iraq. That assessment may have given John Kerry the campaign issue he's been looking for as he quickly charged that President Bush has not told the nation the truth about Iraq. The Bush campaign shot back that Iraq was on the path to democracy and Kerry's views were too pessimistic (story, Page 28).
For the U.S. military, Iraq is increasingly feeling like a Catch-22: U.S. forces get criticized when they fail to stop attacks by insurgents and terrorists--and blamed for the civilian deaths that occur when they do go after them. The Arab satellite channels amplify the situation by focusing relentlessly on civilian deaths. When one of its own reporters was killed on camera last week by an American helicopter, the Al Arabiya network repeatedly showed his final, heartbreaking cry, "Please help me, I am dying."
In Iraq, where conspiracy theories abound, many believe the American superpower is omnipotent and so U.S. forces could avoid the collateral damage, clamp down on street crime, and end the terror attacks--if only they wanted to. "The majority of people blame the Americans for creating this crisis in order to stay longer and longer in Iraq," says Majid Salim, a Baghdad talk radio host.
That may sound preposterous to Americans, but it is a widely held view on which the insurgency feeds. Says Michael O'Hanlon, a scholar at Washington's Brookings Institution, "Why is the resistance estimated to be four times stronger today than it was? Why do people who didn't fight us a year ago choose to fight now? In some cases it is because their brother got killed."
During the initial invasion of Iraq, the military was squaring off against the remnants of the Republican Guard and irregular militias. In those fights, a combination of precision weapons and careful soldiers minimized--though hardly eliminated--civilian casualties. Now that America is supposed to be stabilizing and rebuilding the country, Iraqis expect U.S. forces to maintain order, provide security, and avoid killing civilians. But as the fight has undergone a metamorphosis into an urban guerrilla war--a scenario that was dreaded by military planners before the invasion of Iraq--precision weapons have grown less useful and arguably less precise.
Nevertheless, the United States has continued to rely on airstrikes, a tactic that is becoming increasingly controversial. The United States has used fearsome AC-130 gunships to attack individual safehouses in crowded areas. The Pentagon says the strikes will continue as the military works to retake towns controlled by insurgents. Take the example of the September 13 strike on Fallujah. The military said it was a precision attack with warplanes and artillery that destroyed a hideout where associates of Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab Zarqawi were meeting. But hospital officials told reporters that women and children were among the dead. They also said an ambulance carting wounded from the scene was destroyed by American forces, another image shown repeatedly on Arab TV.
Because of such incidents, State Department officials have quietly urged the Pentagon to curtail airstrikes--and some government officials portray Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld as too reliant on airpower. Using airstrikes in places like Fallujah is "the dumbest possible thing anybody could ever dream up," says a U.S. official who previously served in the military. "[The Pentagon] has this leadership that believes precision munitions are manna from heaven. They do not understand what is happening. This is the worst counterinsurgency effort I have seen in 40 years."
The military says the strikes have been effective and have minimized American casualties. Generals insist that Arab television--and to a lesser extent American media--have exaggerated the civilian toll. Part of the problem is that those who seem to be innocent bystanders sometimes are not. U.S. officers suspect some insurgents use children for reconnaissance missions or to distract soldiers. And there may be some truth to the suspicion; one insurgent, who calls himself Kaznow, told U.S. News that he has a group of kids as young as 8 in Fallujah who have been used to help in attacks. "One child can prepare a bomb while other children joke with the troops," Kaznow boasts.
Military officials say that in many cases they have no choice but to use airstrikes. It is often a matter of perspective. Arab journalists grilled an American general in Iraq last week about why a helicopter armed with rockets was used to destroy a disabled Bradley around which insurgents, civilians, and reporters had gathered. To Iraqis the attack seemed senseless: Was destroying a vehicle worth taking civilian lives? In Washington, Army officials said they could not let insurgents get the Bradley's communication gear. Many Bradleys are equipped with "blue force trackers" that show the location of American vehicles. If insurgents captured the tracker and could make it work, all American soldiers would be at risk. Using a ground force to retrieve the device would very likely have endangered soldiers and led to more civilian causalities. "Somalia, Somalia, Somalia," says an Army officer. "You send in a group and they get surrounded? It's a bad situation."
Unfortunately, a soldier in an attack helicopter or airman in an AC-130 has a hard time telling civilian from combatant. And unless an airstrike goes absolutely perfectly, buildings near the target are often damaged. "No one is happy about it," says Doug Johnson, a research professor at the U.S. Army War College. "When you are dealing with an insurgency, it is counterproductive to kill the people who aren't the bad guys; everyone understands that."
Military leaders have suggested that they are preparing to retake Samarra, Fallujah, and other insurgent-controlled Sunni towns. Some military experts fear that could be a mistake, and Marine Lt. Gen. James Conway, who led the first assault in April, told reporters that he opposed that plan. "When we were told to attack Fallujah, I think we certainly increased the level of animosity that existed," Conway said. O'Hanlon says a second assault on Fallujah could further stoke the perception among Iraqis that the Americans do not care about noncombatants.
Since the beginning of the war, the military has dealt with the issue of civilian casualties in a piecemeal way. Military lawyers have handed out $2,500 payments to families. Advocates for victims say the awards are inconsistent and can't be called "compensation" or "reparation" because the military doesn't want to set a precedent. The reparations, in the end, also achieve questionable results. While the money helps, Iraqis want a sense of military accountability. "Now," says Marla Ruzicka, founder of the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict, "Iraqis think the U.S. military works with impunity."
There are signs that the military realizes that it must address the issue of civilian casualties more openly. Last Thursday, after hitting another suspected terrorist hideout in an attack they claimed killed as many as 60 people, officers emphasized that the compound was in a remote area surrounded by fields. U.S. forces broke it off when the insurgents fled into a nearby town, the military said, "in order to protect the civilian populace and minimize collateral damage."
For now, though, the body count keeps rising. Not far from the deputy health minister's office is the place the Iraqis call the "operations room." Here, under fluorescent lights, Alla Jabber Moussa sits chain-smoking, watching the news, and answering the phone. On the wall hangs a dry-erase board where he tallies the record of the dead. Moussa is weary and disillusioned. "Those people are innocent," he says. "America must be more precise in its attacks."
With Bay Fang and Beth Potter
This story appears in the September 27, 2004 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.