London, Oct. 23: After releasing 4,00,000 classified US military documents on Iraq war, the WikiLeaks founder and editor-in-chief, Mr Julian Assange, said that the reports documented 1,09,000 deaths, including 66,000 civilians, of which 15,000 were previously undocumented.
“That tremendous scale should not make us blind to the small human scale in this material. It is the deaths of one and two people per event that killed the overwhelming number of people in Iraq,” he said.
Mr John Sloboda, of the organisation Iraq Body Count, who also was at the press conference said that the names of the victims had been recorded by the US troops. “Names are the gold-dust of public recording,” he said.
“Seven years on and the public does not have a full account of the terrible human cost of this ongoing Iraq war to the people,” he said.
“What we have instead is an incomplete patchwork of stories, pictures and data. The victims of this war, their families and the public deserve better than this. There is a public right to know,” Mr Sloboda added.
Mr Phil Shiner, a solicitor of Public Interest Lawyers said that some of the deaths could have involved British forces and would now be the subject of legal action through the UK courts.
The documents reveal many previously unreported instances in which American soldiers killed civilians — at checkpoints, from helicopters, in operations. Such killings are a central reason Iraqis turned against the American presence in their country, a situation that is now being repeated in Afghanistan. The archive contains reports on at least four cases of lethal shootings from helicopters.
In the bloodiest, on July 16, 2007, as many as 26 Iraqis were killed, about half of them civilians. However, the tally was called in by two different people, and it is possible that the deaths were counted twice.
In another case, in February 2007, an Apache helicopter shot and killed two Iraqi men believed to have been firing mortars, even though they made surrendering motions, because, according to a military lawyer cited in the report, “they cannot surrender to aircraft, and are still valid targets.”