What Happened in the Iraq War? Julian Assange at WikiLeaks Press Conference (2010)

• published: 09 Jun 2013
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The Iraq War documents leak is the WikiLeaks disclosure of a collection of 391,832 United States Army field reports, also called the Iraq War Logs, of the Iraq War from 2004 to 2009 to several international media organizations and published on the Internet by WikiLeaks on 22 October 2010. The files record 66,081 civilian deaths out of 109,000 recorded deaths.The leak resulted in the Iraq Body Count project adding 15,000 civilian deaths to their count, bringing their total to over 150,000, with roughly 80% of those civilians. It is the biggest leak in the military history of the United States, surpassing the Afghan War documents leak of 25 July 2010. The logs contain numerous reports of previously unknown or unconfirmed events that took place during the war. According to the Iraq Body Count project, a sample of the deaths found in about 800 logs, extrapolated to the full set of records, shows an estimated 15,000 civilian deaths that had not been previously admitted by the US government. 66,000 civilians were reported dead in the logs, out of 109,000 deaths in total.[8][10] The IBC has so far added a total of 3,334 of these previously unrecorded civilian deaths to its database from their ongoing analysis of the war logs. A list of these incidents, added as of 2 January 2013, has been published on the IBC website.[11][12] The Guardian stated that the logs show "US authorities failed to investigate hundreds of reports of abuse, torture, rape and even murder by Iraqi police and soldiers"; the coalition, according to The Guardian, has "a formal policy of ignoring such allegations", unless the allegations involve coalition forces.[2] Sometimes US troops classified civilian deaths as enemy casualties. For example, the July 12, 2007, Baghdad airstrike by US helicopter gunships which killed two Reuters journalists along with several men thought to be armed suspected to be insurgents. They, including the journalists, were all listed as "enemy killed in action".[2] Wired Magazine said that even after the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse incident came to light in 2004, abuse of prisoners or detainees by Iraqi security forces continued; in one recorded case, US troops confiscated a "hand cranked generator with wire clamps" from a Baghdad police station, after a detainee claimed to have been brutalized there.[8] One report analyzed by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism seems to show that "the US military cleared an Apache helicopter gunship to open fire on Iraqi insurgents who were trying to surrender".[13] According to Wired Magazine, "WikiLeaks may have just bolstered one of the Bush administration's most controversial claims about the Iraq war: that Iran supplied many of the Iraq insurgency's deadliest weapons and worked hand-in-glove with some of its most lethal militias. The documents indicate that Iran was a major combatant in the Iraq war, as its elite Quds Force trained Iraqi Shiite insurgents and imported deadly weapons like the shape-charged explosively formed penetrator bombs into Iraq for use against civilians, Sunni militants and U.S. troops."[8] It was reported in the Boston Globe that the documents show Iraqi operatives being trained by Hezbollah in precision military-style kidnappings. Reports also include incidents of US surveillance aircraft lost deep in Iranian territory.[14][15] A number of the documents, as defined by Al Jazeera English, describe how US troops killed almost 700 civilians for coming too close to checkpoints, including pregnant women and the mentally ill. At least a half-dozen incidents involved Iraqi men transporting pregnant family members to hospitals.[16] The New York Times said the reports contain evidence of many abuses, including civilian deaths, committed by contractors. The New York Times points out some specific reports, such as one which says "after the IED strike a witness reports the Blackwater employees fired indiscriminately at the scene."[17] In another event on 14 May 2005, an American unit "observed a Blackwater PSD shoot up a civ vehicle" killing a father and wounding his wife and daughter.[17] A document from December 2006, as defined by The Australian, describes a plan by a Shia militia commander to kidnap US soldiers in Baghdad in late 2006 or early 2007." Also, The Australian reports that "detainee testimony" and "a captured militant's diary" are cited among the documents, in order to demonstrate "how Iran provided Iraqi militias with weapons such as rockets and lethal roadside bombs." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_War_Logs