Violence Kills 335 Iraqis and Maims More Than 1,300 in April

Posted by Haqi Ismael, Azzaman at 6:24 AM on May 5, 2009.

Some 335 Iraqis lost their lives to violence last month, according to an independent Iraqi human rights group.

The group said altogether more than 1,700 Iraqis were either killed or maimed in April which it described as the bloodiest since September 2008 in which 444 Iraqis were killed.

The group, The Institutional Observatory for Rights and Freedoms, relies heavily on government counts which are normally based on hospital records.

But not all Iraqis killed by violence are taken to hospitals and analysts doubt government casualty figures.

They say Islamic tradition makes it a duty to bury the dead as quickly as possible and many families fear breaching the tradition if government hospitals are far away or hard to access.

Moreover, government figures, they say, do not include casualties of sporadic violence.
The analysts also say U.S. troops have never bothered about providing tallies of the Iraqis they kill since invading Iraq in 2003 and Iraqi forces are not so concerned with providing such counts.
April was marked by massive car bombings mainly targeting Iraqi Shiite Muslims.

Tagged as: iraq, iraq casualties, iraqi government, u.s. military, institutional observatory