WASHINGTON — Military documents laid bare in the biggest leak of secret information in U.S. history suggest that as many as 15,000 more Iraqis died than previously acknowledged during the years of sectarian bloodletting and criminal violence after the American-led invasion in 2003.
The accounts of civilian deaths among nearly 400,000 purported Iraq war logs released Friday by the WikiLeaks website include deaths unknown or unreported before now - as many as 15,000 by the count of one independent research group.
“We can see that Iraq was a bloodbath on every corner of that country and the stated aims for going into that war of improving the human-rights situation and improving the rule of law did not eventuate,” WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said at a news conference in London on Saturday. “In terms of raw numbers of people arbitrarily killed, it worsened the situation in Iraq.”
Meanwhile, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s office lashed out at WikiLeaks, accusing it of creating a national uproar by releasing documents that it said were being used “against national parties and leaders, especially against the prime minister.”
The reports also say Iran provided extensive aid to Iraqi militias, such as training an operative who kidnapped American soldiers.
The 391,832 documents, which date from the start of 2004 to Jan. 1, 2010, provide a ground-level view of the war written mostly by low-ranking officers in the field.
WikiLeaks offered The Associated Press and other news organizations access to a searchable database of redacted versions of the reports three hours before its general release Friday. A few news organizations, including The New York Times, France’s Le Monde, Britain’s The Guardian and Germany’s Der Spiegel, were given access to the material far earlier.
The Pentagon has previously declined to confirm the authenticity of WikiLeaks-released records. But it has put to work more than 100 U.S. analysts to review what was previously released and has never indicated that any past WikiLeaks releases were inaccurate.
WikiLeaks receives confidential government and business material and posts the information on the Internet “so readers and historians alike can see evidence of the truth,” the group says on its website.
The documents were worked through to remove names and specific locations that could lead to people’s lives being endangered, Assange said at the London news conference. Assange said he had approached the Pentagon for help with the redactions and it had refused.
The U.S. Defense Department “strongly” condemned the unauthorized release of the documents, spokesman Geoff Morrell said in an emailed statement Friday.
CONTRADICTORY DETAILS
The documents provide a surprising level of detail about many attacks and raise questions about how much the U.S. military knew during the height of sectarian violence that pushed the country to the brink of civil war.
The documents include reports from soldiers on the ground about day-to-day violence and individual attacks - including shootings, roadside bombings, and the execution-style killings and targeted assassinations that left bodies in the streets of Baghdad.
The information is full of military jargon and acronyms but often includes names of victims, times of day of the attacks and the neighborhoods where they occurred.
That contradicted years of statements by American officials, who have repeatedly resisted providing information about civilian casualties. The U.S. military often told journalists in Baghdad that it did not keep detailed records of civilian deaths or have information on particular attacks.
The reports also point to a higher death toll than previously believed.
Iraq Body Count, a private British-based group that has tracked the number of Iraqi civilians killed since the war started in March 2003, said it had analyzed the information and found 15,000 previously unreported deaths. That would raise its total from as many as 107,369 civilians to more than 122,000 civilians.
Civilian casualty figures in the U.S.-led war in Iraq have been hotly disputed. Critics on each side of the divide accuse the other of manipulating the death toll to sway opinion. Independent confirmation of deaths in any particular attack was hard to obtain, since journalists and watchdog groups were often unable to go to the sites of many attacks because of the volatile security situation that prevailed for much of the war.
The Iraqi government has issued a tally claiming at least 85,694 civilians and security officials killed between January 2004 and Oct. 31, 2008.
In August 2008, the Congressional Research Service said the U.S. military was withholding statistics on Iraqi civilian deaths. The Pentagon did publish, in June 2008, a chart on monthly civilian death trends that showed deaths peaking at between 3,500 and 4,000 in December 2006. But it did not release the data used to create the chart.
In July this year, responding to a Freedom of Information Act request, the U.S. military quietly released its most-detailed tally to date - 63,185 civilians and 13,754 Iraqi security forces killed between January 2004 andAugust 2008.
Morrell insisted the U.S. had done its best to prevent innocent civilians from being killed.
“It has been a driving forcefor us, a guiding principle for us over the last seven years of this conflict to do everything in our power - perhaps more than any other military in the history of the world has ever done - to minimize civilian casualties,” Morrell said Friday.
Al-Jazeera, one of several news organizations provided advance access to the WikiLeaks trove, said that from a review of the documents, it tallied reports of 681 civilians killed in error by U.S. and allied forces at checkpoints or by passing convoys. It said most occurred in mainly Sunni areas, which have traditionally provided the bulk of support for the insurgency.
ALLEGATIONS OF ABUSE
The leaked documents include hundreds of reports from across Iraq with allegations of detainee abuse at the hands of Iraqi forces. In a typical case from August 2006, filed by the 101st Airborne Division, U.S. forces discovered a murder suspect who claimed that Iraqi police hung him from the ceiling by handcuffs, tortured him with boiling water and beat him with rods.
A “serious incident report” filed in December 2009 in Tal Afar said U.S. forces had obtained footage of about a dozen Iraqi army soldiers - including a major - executing a detainee. The video showed the bound prisoner being pushed into the street and shot, the Americans said. There was no indication of what happened to the video, or to the Iraqi major or his soldiers. The case is marked “closed.”
Iraq’s government has long faced accusations of prisonerabuse, including as recently as this spring.
Another example: On June 6, 2006, U.S. forces reported discovering large amounts of blood on the floor, a rubber hose and electric wires rigged to a metal door in a holding cell in an Iraqi police station in Husaybah, in western Iraq.
The report called the discoveries “evidence of unchecked torture” and “clear indications” of human-rights violations.
The U.S. report said that for a time, U.S. military advisers slept in the police station to make sure prisoners were not abused, checked arrest logs and counseled Iraqi police, warning them against these practices.
But even a program of training and counseling didn’t put an end to the abuses. According to a report dated Feb. 16, 2009, U.S. forces reported the mistreatment of 33 detainees in custody at the same police station.
Speaking to an audience of Iraqis on Saturday, U.S. Ambassador James Jeffrey said the newly released documents are being carefully studied, and said some of the allegations they include “may or may not be a hundred percent correct.”
“We are very troubled by any claim of any action undertaken - first of all by our own forces, or by our allies and partners, the Iraqi forces,” Jeffrey said.
POLITICAL SMEAR?
Al-Maliki on Saturday denounced the WikiLeaks release as a move to derail his pursuit of another term, while his political opponents called the documents an indictment of his administration.
Much of the attention focused on a report from October 2006, shortly after al-Maliki took office, that describes the arrest of 17 men in Iraqi army uniforms on suspicion of committing robberies. According to the report released by WikiLeaks, the men claimed that they were Iraqi Special Forces working for the prime minister’s office.
Al-Maliki’s political opponents said the report supported their claims that the prime minister had used state forces for nefarious ends.
“For years, we have been talking about the armed groups that are working under the name of the Ministry of Interior and Ministry of Defense that have direct connections with some leaders in the government,” said Maysoon al-Damluji, a spokesman for Iraqiya, the secular political bloc that finished first in Iraq’s March 7 elections, slightly ahead of al-Maliki’s State of Law bloc.
She also said that the reports of abuses of Iraqi prisoners by Iraqi soldiers and police officers were a powerful indictment of al-Maliki’s government.
“I do not think that [al-Maliki] has any chance for the prime minister’s position, now he only has Iran and the Sadrists,” she said, referring to the party of the anti-American Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, who endorsed al-Maliki’s slate this month, giving him an edge.
Al-Maliki and his partisans rejected the allegations, insisting that they had followed the law and denying any abuse of prisoners. They also tried to discredit the leaked documents as little more than a political smear.
“These are all just fakes from the Internet and Photoshop,” said Hassan al-Sneid, a leader of al-Maliki’s governing State of Law coalition, who blamed an anti-government media conspiracy for the leaks. “It is clear to us that they want to block the formation of a government in Iraq.”
He added, “This is just to be seen in the context of a war against [al-Maliki].”
IRANIAN INTERFERENCE
The documents include f ield reports from 2004 through 2009 describing Iranian backing for Iraqi Shiite militia and provide details supporting warnings by U.S. officials of Iranian interference in Iraq.
In August 2005, for example, then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said that “weapons clearly, unambiguously from Iran” had been found in Iraq, and that Iran’s failure to prevent their transport across the border was “unhelpful.” In March 2006, Rumsfeld accused Iran of sending the Revolutionary Guards, an elite military unit, into Iraq to foment violence.
The documents indicate that as far back as 2005, Iran armed and trained squads to kill senior Iraqi politicians and to undermine U.S. and British military operations, The Guardian reported.
One document from December 2006, posted on The New York Times website, describes a plan by a Shiite militia commander to kidnap U.S. soldiers in Baghdad in late 2006 or early 2007. For the mission, the commander tapped a subordinate who had been trained by Lebanese Hezbollah operatives in Qom, Iran, under the supervision of the Quds Force of the Revolutionary Guards, according to the document.
The next month, four American soldiers were abducted and killed before the U.S. military could free them, and the subordinate’s fingerprints were found at the scene. The U.S. tracked down and killed the subordinate four months later.
In a separate incident in September 2006, American soldiers “well inside Iraqi territory” came under fire from Iranians after a U.S. soldier shot and killed an Iranian soldier who had aimed a rocketpropelled-grenade launcher at the platoon, according to a document posted on the Times website. The platoon had been working with Iraqi troops near the border to search for “key infiltration routes” into the country, the document said.
Army General George Casey, then the top U.S. military commander in Iraq, said in June 2006 that Iran was providing weapons and training to Shiite extremist groups in Iraq who were attacking U.S. troops and Iraqi security forces.
“We are quite confident that the Iranians, through their covert special-operations forces, are providing weapons and training,” Casey said.
The WikiLeaks documents also cite detainee testimony, a captured militant’s diary and discovered weapons caches in demonstrating how Iran provided Iraqi militias with weapons such as rockets and lethal roadside bombs.
Information for this article was contributed by Robert Burns, Anne Gearan, Pauline Jelinek, Bushra Juhi, Kim Gamel, Hamid Ahmed, Sameer N. Yacoub, Lara Jakes and Raphael Satter of The Associated Press; by Viola Gienger, Thomas Penny and Tony Capaccio of Bloomberg News; and by Jack Healy, John Leland and Duraid Adnan of The New York Times.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 10/24/2010