U.S. compensation is scant consolation

BAGHDAD, IRAQ –Nearly a year ago, Ali Kadem Hashem watched his wife burn to death and his three children die after an American missile hit his house.

Last week, he got $5,000 from the U.S. government and an “I’m sorry” from a young captain.

Hashem sat for a few minutes staring at the stack of crisp hundred-dollar bills.

“Part of me didn’t want to take it,” he said. “It was an insult.”

But the captain insisted.

“A few thousand dollars isn’t going to bring anybody back,” Army Capt. Jonathan Tracy explained later. “But, right now, it’s all we can do.”

It has been nearly a year since the war in Iraq started, but U.S. military commanders are just beginning to reckon with the volume of civilian casualties streaming in for assistance. Twice a week, at a center in Baghdad, grief-weary Iraqis line up, some on crutches, some disfigured some clutching photographs of smashed houses and dead children, all ready to file a claim for money or medical treatment. It is part of a new compensation process unique to this war.

Outside the room where the captain was saying he was sorry, a long line of people waited. One was Ayad Bressem, a 12-year-old boy scorched by a cluster bomb. His face is covered by a rash of ugly blue freckles. Children on street call him “Mr. Gunpowder.”

“I just want something,” the burned boy said.

“Come back later,” a guard told him. “You’ll get some money. But we’re busy.”

Military officials say they do not have precise figures or even estimates of the number of noncombatant Iraqis killed and wounded by U.S.-led forces in Iraq.

“We don’t keep a list,” a Pentagon spokeswoman, Lt. Cmdr. Jane Campbell, said.

“It’s just not policy.”

Civilian casualties

But nonprofit groups in Iraq and the United States say there were thousands of civilian causalities, many more than in the recent conflict in Afghanistan or the Persian Gulf War of 1991.

According to Civic, a nonprofit organization that has surveyed Iraqi hospitals, burial societies and hundreds of families, more than 5,000 civilians were killed between March 20, when the war started, and May 1, when major combat operations were declared ended.

“It says a lot that the military doesn’t even keep track of these things,” said Maria Ruzicka, Civic’s founder.

The Project of Defense Alternatives, a nonpartisan, arms control think tank in Cambridge, Mass., tracked Iraqi civilian casualties through hospital surveys and demographic analysis. The group estimated that the number of civilians killed in heavy combat was between 3,200 and 4,300.

Whatever the true figures, the list is growing.

A few months ago, according to an official with the Iraqi Interior Ministry, U.S. soldiers shot and killed a man driving in his car with a hole in the muffler. The soldiers said the sputtering exhaust sounded like gunfire.

“The Americans are so jumpy,” said Jameel Ghani Hashim, manager of homicide statistics for the Interior Ministry.

Hashim has a 5-inch-thick stack of reports on his desk detailing civilian casualty incidents. He said preliminary figures indicate that about 500 Iraqi civilians were killed by U.S.-led forces during the occupation.

Mohammed al-Mosawi, deputy director of the Human Rights Organization of Iraq, said that more than 400 families had filed reports of wrongful deaths at the hands of U.S. soldiers.

U.S. commanders declined to quantify how many Iraqi civilians had been killed by their forces during the occupation, even though some of that information is being tabulated.

“We do keep records of innocent civilians who are killed accidentally by coalition force soldiers,” said Brig. Gen. Mark Hertling, assistant commander for the 1st Armored Division, which patrols Baghdad. “And, in fact, in every one of those innocent-death situations, we conduct internal investigations to determine what happened.”

Maiming cluster bombs

Many groups faulted the military for its continues use of cluster bombs, explosives within explosives that sprinkle hundreds of soda-can size “bomblets” over a wide area.

Steve Goose, an arms expert at Human Rights Watch, an organization that published two reports on civilian casualties in Iraq, said that while the Air Force showed greater restraint using cluster bombs, the Army did not.

“The Army is still using older weapons and firing then into heavily populated areas,” Goose said.

One of the problems with cluster bombs is that some bomblets do not explode right away.

That is exactly what disfigured Ayad Bressem, the boy whose face looks as if it was tattooed.

On April 25, Ayad said, he was tending his cows in the village of Kifil, south of Baghdad, when a stray bomblet in the grass near him burst open. It sprayed explosive powder and embedded bits of metal in his face, leaving him blind in one eye and coating his skin with dark little dots that look like pencil stabs.

His mother, Nazar, scooped him up in her arms and rushed him to the village doctor. Ayad was in a coma for weeks. When he emerged, his mother looked down at a face she barely knew.

“He used to be so beautiful,” she said.

His father, Ali, went to dozens of Army hospitals and bases, searching for help. The prognosis was always the same. Army doctors said Ayad’s cornea was scarred and that rehabilitation would be difficult.

Ayad smiles a lot, but sometimes he flies into rage.

“He beats me for no reason,” his mother said. “He threatens to cut my throat. But I don’t care. I am his mother.”

This week, Ayad and his father packed a lunch and tool a bus to Baghdad. Ayad was wearing sunglasses and a scarf over his face. He does this often, even when the weather is very hot.

“The children tease him,” his father explained.

When the two arrived at the victims’ center run by Tracy, there was a crowd pressing against the doors.

On Sundays and Thursdays, Tracy sits in a room on the second floor of the convention center and doles out short stacks of cash to civilian casualty victims. The Army calls them “sympathy payments.”

Tracy also helps process claims under the Foreign Claims Act, which covers damages and wrongful death, but only in noncombat situations. For each claim that is filed, Tracy checks the allegations made by the civilians against a database of military incident reports. If they match, the military pays the civilians, but does not issue a formal apology or claim responsibility. Of 540 claims files, he said he has paid 261. While occasional payments were made to families wrongly bombed in Afghanistan, there was nothing this formalized before.

Tracy, 27, said he had absorbed a lot of grief in that little room.

“I’m getting pretty burned out,” he said.

He is limited in what he can pay. Guidelines set the maximum sympathy payments at $1,000 per injury, $2,500 per life.

With the daily patter of bombings, rocket attacks and inadvertent killings, life in Iraq may seem cheap. But many Iraqis say it is not that cheap.

“This war of yours cost billions,” said Abbas Ahmed, who was given $6,000 after an American missile killed his brother, his sister, his wife and his six children. “Are we not worth more than a few thousand?”