17 |
Civilian casualties
196.
Ms Short (who
had resigned as International Development Secretary in
May
2003) wrote
to Mr Straw on 13 January 2005 to express her support for the
Count the
197.
Mr Straw
replied on 3 March:
“We have
never made our own assessment of Iraqi casualties … This is
because,
after
careful consideration of the different means of calculating
casualties, we
decided
that the current circumstances would prevent a valid assessment by
the
198.
Mr Straw
advised that the MOD had now published overall casualty figures
drawn
from
military incident reports. The UK military aimed to minimise
civilian casualties by
using
careful targeting procedures. Target clearance procedures
considered targets on
an
individual basis; the MOD did not believe that an estimate of
casualties in Iraq as a
whole would
help them to evaluate those targeting procedures.
199.
Mr Asquith
discussed civilian casualties with Dr Kirkup on 21
March.127
Dr
Kirkup
“rebutted”
the suggestion that an accurate assessment of casualties would be
“an
essential
element of assessing and improving the current health situation in
Iraq”.
He
confirmed that the Iraqi MOH’s figures provided “the most reliable
assessment [of
casualties]
currently available”.
200.
Dr Kirkup
identified four sources of information on casualties:
•
the Iraqi
MOH’s systems for recording deaths, which had been
reasonably
sound
before the conflict but had “taken a serious hit” and were only
now
recovering;
•
civil
registration (death certificates): there was no reliable civil
registration
system;
•
surveys:
the security situation was not conducive to effective research,
in
particular
by limiting the scope to obtain the necessary range of data and
by
introducing
interviewee bias; and
•
figures
from the military: “[those] would help to provide a more complete
picture
of the
causes of death and whether deaths had actually occurred. When
dealing
with
incomplete data it is important to have as many sources as
possible.”
201.
Mr Asquith
and Dr Kirkup also considered possible areas of assistance to the
Iraqi
health
service, including data collection and analysis.
202.
The record of
the meeting concluded: “Our position on assessing Iraqi
casualty
figures
reinforced.”
125
Letter
Short to Straw, 13 January 2005, ‘Count the Call’.
126
Letter
Straw to Short, 3 March 2005, [untitled].
127
Minute FCO
[junior official] to Asquith, 22 March 2005, ‘Iraq Casualties:
Director Iraq’s Meeting with
Dr Bill
Kirkup, 21 March 2005’.
205