Sites Holmquist trys, and often fails, to go no more than a couple of days without visiting (some of which Holmquist regularly swipes links from without attribution)
"In the first attack late on Tuesday, US jets fired several missiles on Falluja, killing four people and wounding 11 others. A hospital spokesman said that a child and an elderly man were among the dead," Aljazeera.net writes today.
While America mourns the deaths of more than 1,000 of its sons and daughters in the Iraq campaign, far more Iraqis have died since the United States invaded in March 2003. No official, reliable figures exist, but private estimates range from 10,000 to 30,000 killed across the nation.
At Sheik Omar Clinic, a big book records 10,363 violent deaths in Baghdad and nearby towns alone since the war began last year deaths caused by car bombs, clashes between Iraqis and coalition forces, mortar attacks, revenge killings and robberies.
The violent deaths recorded in the clinic's leather ledger come from only one of Iraq's 18 provinces and do not cover people who died in such flashpoint cities as Najaf, Karbala, Fallujah, Tikrit and Ramadi.
Iraqi dead include not only insurgents, police and soldiers but also civilians caught in crossfire, blown apart by explosives or shot by mistake both by fellow Iraqis or by American soldiers and their multinational allies. And they include the victims of crime that has surged in the instability that followed the collapse of Saddam Hussein's regime.
Adding to the complexity of sorting out what has happened, the records that have been kept don't always say whether a death came in a combat situation or from some other cause.
The prospect of violent death is the latest burden for a people who suffered through decades of war and a brutal dictatorship under Saddam, whose regime has been accused by human rights groups of killing as many as 300,000 Iraqis it deemed enemies.
"Iraqi officials demanded to know yesterday why so little international attention was being given to their numerous dead as the US mourned the death of 1,000 soldiers since the invasion of Iraq," Patrick Cockburn writes in today's Independent. posted by micah holmquist at 9/09/2004 11:44:00 AM
