Pentagon admits keeping figures on Iraqi civilians killed

NEW YORK - The Pentagon has done a major about-turn in Iraq by admitting for the first time that it is keeping track of civilian casualties.

The figures, slipped into a single bar graph in a lengthy report submitted to the United States Congress last month, show that the daily number of Iraqi casualties has more than doubled in the past 18 months.

According to the report, nearly 26,000 Iraqis have been killed or wounded in attacks by insurgents, with about 26 casualties a day between January and March of last year, rising to 64 a day in the run up to the constitution referendum.

This contradicts the Pentagon's own assertion that the security situation in Iraq is improving - and that appearances to the contrary reflect the media's focus on bombings in and around the capital, Baghdad.

Previously, the US military insisted it kept records only of the casualties among its own personnel and avoided any broader discussion of the issue of civilian tolls.

Both Washington and London have regularly cast doubt on independent estimates of the number of Iraqis killed since the 2003 invasion.

Pentagon officials said yesterday that the report was a rough estimate and did not distinguish between civilian casualties and members of Iraq's nascent security services killed or wounded in insurgency attacks.

"They have begun to realise that when you focus only on the US it gives the impression that the US doesn't care about Iraqis," Anthony Cordesman, a military expert at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, told the New York Times. "In these kinds of political battles you need to count your allies, not just yourself."

"It's a kind of a snapshot," a Pentagon spokesman said. "The Defence Department doesn't maintain a comprehensive or authoritative count of Iraqi casualties."

The bar graph appeared in a quarterly audit of Iraq operations that Congress has insisted on receiving since the passing of an emergency spending bill.

Analysis by the independent group Iraq Body Count, which compiles statistics for civilian casualties based on reports by news outlets, suggests that the figure of 26,000 casualties corresponds to a death toll of nearly 6500 - based on a ratio of one death for every three casualties.

This figure is significantly lower that Iraq Body Count's estimate for the same period of 11,613 - a figure which includes those killed by US and allied forces.

- INDEPENDENT