http://www.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUSL1069138220080110?feedType=RSS&feedName=worldNews
U.S. warplanes pound southern Baghdad outskirts
Thu Jan 10, 2008 4:06pm ESTBy Peter Graff
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - U.S. warplanes launched their biggest air strike in Iraq since at least 2006 on Thursday, bombarding date palm groves on Baghdad's southern outskirts with more than 40,000 pounds of bombs in a matter of minutes.
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"Thirty-eight bombs were dropped within the first 10 minutes, with a total tonnage of 40,000 pounds," the military said in a statement. "Each bomber passed over twice and the F-16s followed to complete the set."
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U.S. forces spokesman Maj. Winfield Danielson said Thursday's air strike was the biggest in Iraq since at least 2006. A spokeswoman for U.S. forces in central Iraq, Maj. Allayne Conway, said it was too soon to assess the damage inflicted.
UN Raps Iraq for Withholding 'Grim' Civilian Toll
By Yara Bayoumy
AlertNet
April 25, 2007The United Nations accused Iraq on Wednesday of withholding sensitive civilian casualty figures
because the government fears the data would be used to paint a "very grim" picture of a worsening
humanitarian crisis. The criticism was contained in a new U.N. human rights report on Iraq which drew fire from U.S. officials in Baghdad and the Iraqi government. They said it was flawed and contained numerous inaccuracies.
The United Nations Assistance Mission in Iraq (UNAMI) said Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's government would not release data on civilian deaths amid spiralling sectarian violence between majority Shi'ites and once dominant Sunni Arabs.
"UNAMI emphasises again the utmost need for the Iraqi government to operate in a transparent manner," the mission said in its latest report on human rights in Iraq.U.N. officials said they were given no official reason why their requests for specific official data had been turned down. U.S. military commanders now give percentages to express broad increases or decreases for civilian deaths. "We were told that the government was becoming increasingly concerned about the figures being used to portray the situation as very grim," UNAMI human rights officer Ivana Vuco told a news conference.http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/issues/iraq/mortality/2007/0425unraps.htmhttp://www.globalpolicy.org/security/issues/iraq/occupation/2007/0605bombardment.htmUS Doubles Air Attacks in Iraq
By Charles J. Hanley
Associated Press
June 5, 2007
http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/issue...
Four years into the war that opened with "shock and awe," U.S. warplanes have again stepped up attacks in Iraq, dropping bombs at more than twice the rate of a year ago. The airpower escalation parallels a nearly four-month-old security crackdown that is bringing 30,000 additional U.S. troops into Baghdad and its surroundings - an urban campaign aimed at restoring order to an area riven with sectarian violence. It also reflects increased availability of planes from U.S. aircraft carriers in the Persian Gulf. And it appears to be accompanied by a rise in Iraqi civilian casualties.
In the first 4 1/2 months of 2007, American aircraft dropped 237 bombs and missiles in support of
ground forces in Iraq, already surpassing the 229 expended in all of 2006, according to U.S. Air Force figures obtained by The Associated Press."Air operations over Iraq have ratcheted up significantly, in the number of sorties, the number of
hours (in the air)," said Col. Joe Guastella, Air Force operations chief for the region. "It has a lot to do with increased pressure on the enemy by MNC-I" - the Multinational Corps-Iraq - "combined with more carriers."
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Examples of attacks, as reported in the Air Force's daily summary:
-Last Friday, an Air Force F-16 fighter dropped a guided 500-pound bomb near the northern city of Tal Afar that destroyed a vehicle laden with explosives to be used as a bomb.
-The day before, an F-16 dropped a similar bomb on "an inaccessible building being used by insurgents" near Samarra, north of Baghdad, with "good effects."
-Last Wednesday, another F-16 dropped bombs on "an illegal bridge and an insurgent vehicle in Baghdad."
Iraq Death Toll Rivals
Rwanda Genocide, Cambodian Killing Fields
By Joshua Holland
AlterNet
September 17, 2007
http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/issue...According to a new study, 1.2 million Iraqis have met violent deaths since the 2003 invasion, the
highest estimate of war-related fatalities yet. The study was done by the British polling firm ORB,
which conducted face-to-face interviews with a sample of over 1,700 Iraqi adults in 15 of Iraq's 18
provinces. Two provinces -- al-Anbar and Karbala -- were too dangerous to canvas, and officials in a third, Irbil, didn't give the researchers a permit to do their work. The study's margin of error was plus-minus 2.4 percent. Field workers asked residents how many members of their own household had been killed since the invasion. More than one in five respondents said that at least one person in their home had been murdered since March of 2003. One in three Iraqis also said that at least some neighbors "actually living on street" had fled the carnage, with around half of those having left the country. In Baghdad, almost half of those interviewed reported at least one violent death in their household.
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These numbers suggest that the invasion and occupation of Iraq rivals the great crimes of the last century -- the human toll exceeds the 800,000 to 900,000 believed killed in the Rwandan genocide in 1994, and is approaching the number (1.7 million) who died in Cambodia's infamous "Killing Fields" during the Khmer Rouge era of the 1970s.
While the stunning figures should play a major role in the debate over continuing the occupation, they probably won't. That's because there are three distinct versions of events in Iraq -- the bloody criminal nightmare that the "reality-based community" has to grapple with, the picture the commercial media portrays and the war that the occupation's last supporters have conjured up out of thin air.
Similarly, American discourse has also developed three different levels of Iraqi casualties. There's the approximately 1 million killed according to the best epidemiological research conducted by one of the world's most prestigious scientific institutions, there's the 75,000-80,000 (based on news reports) the Washington Post and other commercial media allow, and there's the clean and antiseptic blood-free war the administration claims to have fought (recall that they dismissed the Lancet findings out of hand and yet offered no numbers of their own). Here's the troubling thing, and one reason why opposition to the war isn't even more intense than it is: Americans were asked in an AP poll conducted earlier this year how many Iraqi civilians they thought had been killed as a result of the invasion and occupation, and the median answer they gave was 9,890. That's less than a third of the number of civilian deaths confirmed by U.N. monitors in 2006 alone.
According to a 2005 report by Lt. Col. Dean Mengel at the Army War College, the number of rounds being fired off is enormous: noted that the Army estimated it would need 1.5 billion small arms rounds per year, which was three times the amount produced just three years earlier. In another, it was noted by the Associated Press that soldiers were shooting bullets faster than they could be produced by the manufacturer. 1.5 billion rounds per year …
Given that the estimated number of active insurgents in Iraq has never exceeded 30,000 -- and is usually given as less than 20,000 -- that leaves a lot of deadly lead flying around. Everyone agrees that the U.S. soldier is the best-trained fighter on earth, so it's somewhat bizarre that war supporters believe their shots rarely hit anybody.Joshua Holland is an AlterNet staff writer.
http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/issues/iraq/mortality/2007/0917orbpolldeaths.htm
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