Nearly 1 400 Iraqi civilians were murdered in targeted killings last month in Baghdad alone, and many more died in indiscriminate bomb blasts, making May the bloodiest month in the capital since the war began, Iraq’s Health Ministry said on Tuesday.
The grim statistics came as Iraqi police found nine severed heads in plastic bags stuffed in cardboard fruit boxes by the side of a road in the al-Hadid area of Baquba, north of Baghdad, and a report said United States troops mistakenly killed as many as seven Iraqi civilians a week at checkpoints last summer. This death rate has since been brought down to one a week, after top officers ordered changes to how checkpoints were manned.
The checkpoint casualty statistics, published by the Wall Street Journal, quoting US defence officials in Iraq, reflect a heavy toll on civilians who fail to notice or understand orders to stop their cars and are shot by troops nervous about suicide bombers. They do not include deliberate killings by US troops, such as the Haditha massacre last November. They also exclude those killed by insurgents.
Sarah Sewall, director of the Carr Centre for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University, which has been working with the military to refine counter-insurgency techniques, said the decrease in checkpoint deaths was part of a broader effort to reduce civilian casualties.
A manual on how to operate checkpoints, produced by the Centre for Army Lessons Learned, at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, is to be distributed to troops soon. The reforms have been driven by Lieutenant General David Petraeus, the commanding general at Fort Leavenworth, and Lieutenant General Peter Chiarelli, the coalition commander in Iraq.
Chiarelli ordered that, alongside the often perfunctory legal investigations into the accidental shooting of civilians, lessons should be drawn from each incident and operating procedures adjusted accordingly. ”It’s a different ethos towards civilian casualties,” Sewall said. ”It’s wonderfully important. The tragedy is that it’s happening in this particular war.” – Guardian Unlimited Â