Why AP Counted Civilian Deaths in Iraq

By: Barbara Bedway As U.S. forces in Iraq continue their postwar fight against enemy forces, the number of civilian casualties sustained in the conflict looms large as a moral measure of the true cost of this war -- and as an obstacle in the parallel fight for the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people. A complete accounting may never be possible, but the Associated Press has made a groundbreaking effort to number the civilian dead (as they did in the war in Afghanistan). Other surveys have attempted to count civilian casualties within Baghdad, but AP is the first to include the entire country.

"During the war, there was a great deal of debate in the international press, especially in the Arab press, about whether America was being careful enough, using enough discretion, about civilians," Niko Price, correspondent at large for the AP, who wrote the story on the tally, told E&P. "Looking at what happened in detail gives a basis for people to make an educated judgment on how careful Americans were in this war."

Such accounting, however, raises perhaps as many questions as it answers.

Using a rigorous methodology, seven AP reporters in Iraq over a period of five weeks reviewed dozens of documents from 60 of Iraq's 124 hospitals, covering the period from March 20, the war's beginning, to April 20, when the fighting abated. The tally: 3,240 civilians died throughout the country, with 1,896 of those in Baghdad alone. But AP referred to these totals as "still fragmentary" with the likely figure "significantly" higher.

"We believed the story would have more credibility if we didn't use estimates, and the number is one we could absolutely vouch for," said Price, who visited the bulk of Baghdad hospitals. "A reporter in New York went through media reports during the war to give us an idea where we should look, so we didn't miss any obvious places."

The U.S. military does not compile its own count of civilian deaths, as Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. Jim Cassella explained to AP: "Our efforts focus on destroying the enemy's capabilities, so we never target civilians and have no reason to try to count such unintended deaths."

The military, however, has asserted it would investigate certain incidents that resulted in civilian deaths. Charles J. Hanley, a roving AP correspondent who helped research the tally in Basra and Hillah, had earlier reported on heavy civilian casualties in Hillah during days of cluster bombing by the U.S. military. On May 17, he reported that Central Command said the incident was under investigation. He was surprised to read in Price's AP story that Central Command now acknowledged "it had no information to add" about the tragedy.

A Central Command spokesman also told AP no inquiry was conducted into the controversial March 28 shelling of the al-Shoala market in Baghdad -- another bloody incident it had promised to probe.

"As a journalist trying to convey truth to the American people," Hanley told E&P, "I find it distressing that U.S. military spokesmen seem to facilely tell journalists that they are conducting an investigation into an incident and then weeks later, when attention is distracted, let it slip out that there was no investigation, that no further information is available."

Hanley, part of a Pulitzer Prize-winning team in 2000 that investigated the killing of hundreds of Korean refugees by the U.S. military during the Korean War (and co-authored a book about the incident, The Bridge at No Gun Ri) believes there may be further disclosures as time goes on, since evidence is fresh at hand. "With No Gun Ri," he explained, "we had to deal with a Pentagon that held -- essentially for years -- that the U.S. military was not even in the area of the massacre."

Hanley believes that the AP count is a "basic, conservative, beginning," and that "additional journalism could be done exploring individual incidents to see if any warrant further investigation. A very basic fact in reporting any war is to establish the impact of that war, not only on your own military, but also on enemy military and civilians. Otherwise, we wage wars without knowing the meaning of them."

Inevitably, some of the obvious places did not get counted by AP. Excluded were hospitals whose written records did not separately identify civilian and military dead. Excluded also were three civilian hospitals in Basra, Iraq's second-largest city, because doctors there could offer only an estimate that 85% of their 413 recorded deaths were civilian. And there is of course no way to account for dead civilians never taken to hospitals, for those buried by family members, for those left beneath the rubble.

Though most of the doctors Price dealt with were sympathetic, many were angry at the U.S. for killing so many civilians in this war. At one hospital in Mosul, AP's Baghdad correspondent Sameer N. Yacoub was challenged by U.S. soldiers, who questioned him extensively about his story, including its purpose.
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