Iraq Toll Underestimated by 15,000

Over the last six years of fighting in Iraq, some 15,000 civilian deaths fell into obscurity, according to the Iraq Body Count, the London-based organization that monitors civilian deaths. The latest batch of military documents released by WikiLeaks Friday shows that the U.S. military kept detailed records of Iraqi fatalities—even though the military denied their existence—and that many were never included in the tally. The logs show 109,032 deaths between January 2004 and last December, including 66,000 civilians and 3,771 described as “friendly,” meaning Allied soldiers. “These, together with new information on combatant deaths contained in the logs, will bring the recorded death toll since March 2003 to over 150,000, roughly 80 percent of whom were civilians,” an IBC spokesman said. The IBC also said that the logs revealed another 23,000 unreported acts of violence against Iraqi civilians, offering an “unprecedented level of detail.”