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Key Humanitarian Developments in Iraq
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Dispatch from Iraq
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By MWC News
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 Nearly 25,000 civilians have died in Iraq since the US-led invasion in 2003, according to a new report by academics and peace activists.
"The ever-mounting Iraqi death toll is the forgotten cost of the decision to go to war in Iraq," professor John Sloboda, one of the authors of the report, said.
The survey, carried out by the Iraq Body Count NGO and the Oxford Research Group, is based on more than 10,000 media reports published between 2003-2005. According to the survey results, 24,865 civilians have been killed.
Women and children accounted for almost 20 percent of all civilian deaths and almost half of the deaths were in the capital, Baghdad, the report said.
In a separate development, violence against media workers in Iraq continued in the last week. Gunmen fired on an Al-Iraqiya television crew in Baghdad last Thursday, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) stated. Three people were wounded in the attack, according to news reports.{mosgoogle right}
Masked men walked up to the car in which the news crew were travelling and opened fire, al-Iraqiya correspondent Bassem al-Fadhli, who escaped inury, told AP news agency. This is the latest in a long line of attacks on media staff in the country, whether by insurgents or US forces.
At least three staffers of al-Iraqiya have died since the hostilities began more than two years ago.
The drafting process of Iraq’s new constitution suffered a setback with the assassination on Monday of Mijbil Sheikh al-Issa, a member of the Constitutional Drafting Commission. An adviser to the commission, Dahmen al-Jabouri, was also killed.
UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan strongly condemned the act and hoped that it would not deter other members of the commission in completing the draft by August. Issa was one of 15 Sunni representatives in the commission.
Three British soldiers are facing courts martial for charges amounting to war crimes in Iraq in September 2003, the BBC reported on Tuesday. The three are charged with inhuman treatment of persons under the International Criminal Court Act of 2001.
It is alleged that some of the soldiers committed a number of offences against a group of detainees arrested following a planned operation. The charges were announced by Attorney-General Lord Goldsmith in the British House of Lords on Tuesday evening."The ever-mounting Iraqi death toll is the forgotten cost of the decision to go to war in Iraq," professor John Sloboda, |
Meanwhile, with reconstruction continuing at a slow pace in Iraq due to insecurity, up to US $500 million in soft loans will be made available over the next two years to finance projects in Iraq, the World Bank announced on Monday. The statement was made as the fourth donor’s conference for Iraq was underway at the Dead Sea resort in Jordan.
This lending package, provided at the request of the Iraqi government, is the first to be extended by the World Bank to Iraq since 1973. It is part of the Bank's commitment made at the first international donor conference for Iraq in Madrid in 2003.
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