The Human Costs for Removing Saddam Hussein's Regime for having WMDs

"The Bush administration has admitted that Saddam Hussein probably had NO weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). Senior officials in the Bush administration have admitted that they would be 'amazed' if weapons of mass destruction (WMD) were found in Iraq. "
-Sunday Herald,UK -04 May 2003

The statistics of lost human lives in the barely-fought Battle for Baghdad that culminated in the Fall of the Saddam Statue

According a AP news wire report, at least 1,101 Iraqi civilians, including women and children, with another 1,255 Iraqis, mostly women and children, dead.

TOTAL DEATH: About 2,300 killed in Baghdad alone. Statistics based on records compiled from Baghdad's 19 largest hospitals. The Baghdad death toll also does not include the hundreds of civilians who died in other parts of Iraq.

TOTAL WOUNDED : More than 6,800 Iraqi civilians.

Number of American and British soldiers killed : 125 American and 31 British deaths in the entire war.

The Bush administration says it will make NO effort to tally Iraqi dead, either civilian or military. Yet, Washington had said this was a war of liberating the Iraqi civilian people from a regime and not a war of occupation.

The Iraqi Red Crescent Society's report on civilian deaths could only be available after mid-May.

The doctors believe that US weapons produced most of the Iraqi casualties.

The figures for Iraqis killed exclude uncounted numbers who died but never made it to hospitals. They are mostly buried in shallow graves throughout the city - in cemeteries, back yards, hospital gardens, city parks and mosque grounds. The most telling is the 150 graves dug into the garden around the Al Askan Hospital.

Doctors at several hospitals blamed some civilians died because American soldiers did not allow civilian ambulances into neighbourhoods near the battles.

Ali Ismail Abbas, 12, orphaned, lost both arms and suffered burns to 20 per cent of his body during the bombing of Baghdad..(Reuters)

It was easier for the hospitals to categorise women and children as civilians. But men presented a different challenge, especially in the final days of the war. Some loyalists to Saddam Hussein reportedly fought in civilian clothes, and some soldiers shed their uniforms in retreat.

The doctors said they were able to separate military from civilian by relying on age and other factors. In general, doctors categorised as "civilian" if a person was dressed in civilian clothes and carried no military identification. They said that many soldiers did present military ID at the hospitals. Iraqi doctors acknowledge that the records may not be perfect.

"Was our record-keeping perfect?" said Dr Basim Al-Shaeli, a general surgeon at Al Kharama in the city's southwest sector.

"During the invasion, I was performing 10 major operations a day, staying here around the clock. While I was doing this, the shooting would be going on, bullets would be crashing into the hospital around us, and we could hear the tanks outside the gates. "

"I was performing surgery on an injured neck, an injured head or face, and I was insisting that they be taken home the next day, because the demand for beds was so great, and even so we were always overcrowded. And this wasn't just me; every doctor here worked like this, " he said.

Dr Ameer K Daher, a general surgeon who was trapped near his home by the fighting set up a field hospital in a secondary school with help from his neighbours.

"We buried 10 people in the mosque and treated 45 more with what supplies we had in our homes," he said. "We were not the only people forced to do this."

According to doctors at the Yarmuk Hospital, two pregnant women were killed when an American tank shelled their ambulance on the way to Yarmuk Hospital on April 7. The driver and a doctor were both injured. Later, shells hit the hospital's diabetes centre, destroying an entire floor.


British Prime Minister Tony Blair said he was ready to meet his Maker and answer before God for 'those who have died or have been horribly maimed as a result of my decisions'. Blair accepted that others who believe in 'the same God' may assess that the final judgement will be against him. He said this on April 2, one day after seven Iraqi women and children were shot dead by US soldiers at a checkpoint.

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