AP Toll Says 1,361 Iraqis Killed in April

By LEE KEATH The Associated Press Friday

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Volunteers hunting for bodies in
Fallujah find a woman and her daughter in their home,
killed in the siege but undiscovered for days. Chanting
mourners bury two boys caught in the crossfire of a
Baghdad gunfight. A morgue in Basra overflows with torn
and burned bodies from a suicide bombing.

Victims - young and old, women and men, insurgents and
innocents - have been piling up day by day, making April
the deadliest month for Iraqis - and Americans - since
the fall of Saddam Hussein a year ago.

Official and complete death counts for Iraqis nationwide
are unavailable. But a count by The Associated Press
found that around 1,361 Iraqis were killed from April 1
to April 30 - 10 times the figure of at least 136 U.S.
troops who died during the same period.

The Iraqi tally was compiled from daily records of
violence reported by AP based on statements issued by
the U.S. military, Iraqi police and local hospitals. The
count includes civilians, insurgents and members of the
Iraqi security forces, though a detailed breakdown was
not possible. The Iraqi health ministry and the Red
Crescent could not be reached Friday.

Also, the tally is likely incomplete, because witnesses
reported deaths in some attacks that could not be
confirmed by a hospital, the Iraqi police or U.S.
officials.

The daily carnage, seen by Iraqis before their own eyes
and in bloody images and photos transmitted around the
country by Arab television and Iraqi newspapers, has
heightened anti-U.S. sentiment across the country - even
when the deaths were caused by insurgent attacks.

The siege of Fallujah, where Americans unleashed their
arsenal of warplanes and tanks, became a symbol of
resistance that rallied many Iraqis - Shiite and Sunni -
to the anti-occupation cause.

And the sheer variety of violence - car suicide bombs,
roadside bombs, insurgent rocket and mortar attacks on
civilian neighborhoods, gunbattles - has deepened
Iraqis’ sense of instability and left them skeptical of
U.S. promises of peace and prosperity.

"For this to be happening a year after Saddam fell,
Iraqis are shocked," said Mahmoud Othman, a member of
the U.S.-picked Governing Council.

"This shows that the United States cannot rule Iraqi
properly. They thought they could do a better job than
if they created an Iraqi government right from the
start."

The majority of Iraqi deaths likely took place in the
Marine siege of Fallujah, but the toll there has been a
source of controversy. The head of Fallujah’s hospital,
Rafie al-Issawi, said Friday his records show 731 killed
and around 2,800 wounded since the Marine siege began on
April 1, though he could not immediately provide a
breakdown on how many were women or children. His number
is factored into the AP count.

The Iraqi health minister, Khudayer Abbas, gave a much
lower number on April 22, saying 271 people were killed
in the city. He also put the total number of Iraqi dead
for the month so far, including Fallujah, at 576 - far
lower than the AP count.

U.S. officials have said they do not have a count of
Iraqi civilians killed this month. On April 20, Lt. Gen.
Ricardo Sanchez, the top commander of U.S. forces in
Iraq, said troops had killed 1,000 insurgents in April.
That number was not factored into the AP count because
it was not known what specific battles he was referring
to.

By comparison, the next deadliest month for Iraqis since
the start of the U.S. occupation was March, when 301
Iraqi civilians were killed, according to the Brookings
Institution, which keeps a rough but widely respected
monthly tally.

The Brookings number does not include insurgent or Iraqi
police deaths, as the AP’s April tally does. But at the
most, a few dozen armed Iraqis died in March, not nearly
enough to reach the number of April’s dead.

The April toll still falls short of the number of Iraqi
deaths during the U.S. invasion. An AP survey of records
from 60 of Iraq’s 124 hospitals found that at least
3,240 civilians died from March 20, 2003, to April 20,
2003; the complete number during that period is sure to
be significantly higher.

The AP count includes single attacks that caused large
numbers of casualties. In Basra, 74 people were killed
when suicide attackers set off five car bombs nearly
simultaneously outside police stations on April 21. A
day earlier, a mortar barrage by guerrillas against
Baghdad’s largest prison, Abu Ghraib, killed 22
prisoners, all of them detainees held on suspicion of
being members of the insurgency.

It also includes U.S. reports of insurgents killed in
fighting with American troops. The military said 100
Sunni guerrillas were killed in a fierce battle April
12-13 in the village of Karma, outside Fallujah, and
that 64 Shiite militiamen died Monday in U.S. airstrikes
and a firefight outside Najaf, south of Baghdad.

But many of the deaths came in small incidents around
Baghdad or scattered around the country as violence
stretched from the far north to the far south.

A volley of mortars hit the eastern Baghdad neighborhood
of Sadr City on Saturday, some hitting a market, killing
six people. Another shell pierced a home, went through
two floors and tore a woman sleeping in her bed to
pieces.

In Baghdad on Thursday, Mostapha Fadhl, 6, and Mostapha
Salah, 7, were playing near a road in western Baghdad
when insurgents attacked a U.S. patrol nearby. In the
gunbattle that ensued, the boys were wounded and later
died.

The carnage in Fallujah, where U.S. Marines battled to
uproot Sunni insurgents from their greatest stronghold,
traumatized an entire city. Residents blame many of the
deaths on Marine snipers or bombings by warplanes,
including fearsome AC-130 gunships and F-18s dropping
500-pound bombs.

Two football fields were turned into cemeteries, with
hundreds of freshly dug graves, marked with wooden
planks scrawled with names - some with names of women,
some marked specifically as children. At one of the
fields, an AP reporter was told by volunteer
gravediggers on April 11 that more than 300 people had
been buried there.

On Friday, with the U.S. military trying to implement a
tentative deal to lift the siege, volunteers drove
around looking for the dead that never made it to
hospitals or graveyards. At least eight highly
decomposed bodies were loaded into station wagons,
including those of a woman and her daughter found in a
home in the Golan neighborhood, scene of heavy fighting
this week.

During the height of the siege, residents were unable to
get outside, so an unknown number of dead were buried in
backyards.

"We buried two of my relatives at home," said Ahmed
Ghanim al-Ali, a doctor at one of five local clinics in
Fallujah that have been treating the wounded and
counting the dead. "We cannot give the total number of
martyrs."

washingtonpost.com

AP correspondents Abdul-Qader Saadi and Bassem Mroue in
Fallujah contributed to this report.