The figures given are from the most recent updates provided by the sources
listed – under Iraq Body Count (IBC) methodology explicit updates displace
early-breaking reports, and the most recent updates displace any earlier
ones. Should further, reliable information emerge the figures will be revised
accordingly.
In this incident another consideration was whether it should be included in
IBC’s tally at all. Though compounded by gross incompetence on the
part of the authorities, the link with the foreign military presence and
the security crisis in the country is unmistakable:
Government ministers accused agents provocateurs linked to Sunni Muslim
militants of deliberately panicking the huge crowd of Shia Muslim pilgrims
into a stampede. But in interviews with survivors, rescue workers and
medical staff a far simpler version emerged.
The authorities had wanted to prevent possible suicide bombings against
al-Kadhimiya shrine and had told guards to erect concrete barricades
on the bridge and to search all pilgrims crossing the river.
Nearly a million worshippers converged on the site. The screening process
was inadequate. A bottleneck developed on the bridge. People were either
crushed or leapt for their lives into the river. [Times 01 Sep]
Many witnesses said the chaos was exacerbated by concrete barricades along
the bridge that were meant to deter car bombers but also effectively hindered
pilgrims’ ability to escape. [CT 01 Sep]
“We asked the army troops to lift the concrete barriers from the road
but they told us that the Americans put them in and they can’t move
them,” said Jasim Kinani, who was among the many black-shirted young
male volunteers helping with crowd control around the shrine. [LAT 01 Sep]
Government sources, meanwhile, complained that the American military were
partly to blame for the tragedy by failing to remove blast barriers from
the bridge, which they said made it a bottleneck.
“The first mistake was the closure of all other bridges and the opening
of just the smallest one,” said a defence ministry official. He said
Brigadier Abdul Jalel Khalaf, commander of the Iraqi army’s 1st brigade,
had asked the Americans to remove the concrete barriers, but they had refused.
The same official also accused the Americans of preventing ambulances passing
through roadblocks to reach the scene. “The Americans took a very
bad initiative,” he said. “They prevented the ambulances entering
the area - it was a reason why so many died without the help of anyone.” Coalition
authorities declined comment on the allegations. [Times 04 Sep]
The connection of this incident with the war and occupation, in its details
as well as general circumstances, is well established. The fact that similar
large-scale disasters have happened during religious events elsewhere (notably
in Mecca in 1990) does not in any way lessen the case for considering this
incident as a consequence of the military invasion and occupation of Iraq.
There is however a more complex question about the inclusion of this incident
in IBC's count.
IBC has consistently taken care to exclude deaths from its database which are
a part of the normal “background” level of deaths in Iraq. This
has meant that whenever we added deaths from everyday phenomena such as crime,
we first adjusted for pre-invasion criminal murder rates (in effect, 2002
rates) before adding any excess number to our count.
Despite this we have not included every type of reported or “excess” death.
This is because some deaths, while perhaps traceable to the invasion, carried
less clear moral culpability on the part of the invading powers. For instance,
records at Baghdad’s central morgue include all sudden deaths involving
physical traumas, such as also occur in car accidents. We have not included
such excess deaths in our count, even though one might argue that a possible
boom in car or alcohol imports could have led to more traffic accidents. While
such a phenomenon might well be linked to the invasion, the invaders' responsibility
for it would, we felt, have been too indirect to bring these deaths within
the scope of IBC’s count. (To do so would have required additional information
and a more complex analysis looking into wider issues, such as whether ambulance
and emergency services had been noticeably degraded by the invasion, leading
to a greater proportion of fatalities in accidents.)
To some extent the tragedy on Aimma bridge was also an “accident”,
albeit of calamitous proportions and largely stemming from abjectly inept security
measures. The question regarding its inclusion in IBC’s count doesn’t
involve the incident’s “accidental” component – for
instance, we include the deaths of several Iraqi children accidentally run
over by coalition military convoys because their link to the invasion and military
occupation is direct and obvious. Rather, it is prompted by a different consideration:
that the incident was made possible by the existence of new, and unarguably
invasion-related, freedoms:
Shia Islam, repressed under Saddam Hussein, has enjoyed a revival since
his fall, despite sectarian attacks, including suicide bombings, by Sunni
Arab insurgents. [GUA 01 Sep]
Under Saddam gatherings of this size were banned because he feared they
would turn into political demonstrations. But since his overthrow these
religious parades have become very popular. [IND 04 Sep]
Such public Shiite religious observances, banned during the rule of Saddam
Hussein, have drawn vast crowds in the past two years and have been regular
targets of insurgent bombings that have killed hundreds of worshipers.
[WP 01 Sep]
The moral ambiguity here is that without the invasion, the freedom to gather
in this procession would not have existed at all in Iraq; equally, without
the other corollaries of the invasion and occupation (including a deadly
and relentless armed resistance to its every manifestation) the tragic stampede
would almost certainly have never occurred.
In a manner of speaking, therefore, the war is responsible for these deaths
both from a “positive” and a “negative” standpoint: “positive” in
the sense that for the first time in decades people are able to freely exercise
certain forms of religious observance; and “negative” in view
of pervasive post-invasion violence, fear of which led to the deadly stampede.
The question, then, is whether the religious freedoms brought about by the
military intervention, as exemplified by the religious procession itself,
somehow absolve the US/UK of moral responsibility for the terrible
and (from the perspective of March 2003) unforeseeable tragedy which took
place on August 31st 2005.
Our response to this question is that these governments’ responsibility
doesn’t stop – in fact, doesn’t even principally reside in – the outcomes of
the invasion. It is much more present in the means by which these governments
chose to effect “regime change” in Iraq – namely by military
conquest and dominion over the country.
And it is very much this particular means which is at the heart of the matter
for IBC, for ours is a record of deaths resulting directly from military
intervention in Iraq.
From this perspective, it is irrelevant how “noble” our governments’ intentions
were, nor if their proclaimed goals were successfully realized; it doesn’t
even matter if Iraq ultimately becomes some sort of earthly paradise. What
matters is the human cost of the particular means employed by the US/UK governments
and their coalition partners.
The particular dangers which led to the deaths on Aimma bridge were, as we
have noted earlier, inextricably linked to the invasion and subsequent occupation.
They are not simply the “inherent” risks of newly-established
freedoms but arose directly from the military means by which these
freedoms were delivered. They are therefore quite properly the concern of
IBC.
