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Civilian toll could backfire on US

WASHINGTON POST
International health organisations warned again yesterday that Baghdad's hospitals have been overwhelmed by casualties now that fierce urban combat has erupted across Iraq's capital, with supplies dwindling and medical personnel caught in the crossfire and unable to report to work.
The World Health Organization in Geneva reported that Baghdad hospitals were seeing 100 combat casualties per hour after a column of U.S. tanks made an initial thrust into the city, and that amputations were apparently being performed without sufficient anesthesia or morphine. WHO spokesman Ian Simpson said doctors and nurses who managed to report for duty at Baghdad hospitals were increasingly finding conditions untenable, with stocks of medicine and supplies -- badly depleted by 12 years of international sanctions -vanishing in the crush of civilian and military casualties.
As the death toll climbs and human misery increases, so does concern that
the US military may be alienating the populace it says it is liberating, and fuelling anger in Arab countries and elsewhere. The WHO also warned that Iraqi civilian and military casualties will undoubtedly affect the psychological well-being of children, especially in light of the Iraqi military's heavy reliance on conscripts who often are fathers, uncles and brothers who wanted no part of war.
Defence Department officials have been loathe to estimate a total number of Iraqi military dead. But one senior Pentagon official estimated that between 2,000 and 4,000 Iraqi soldiers had been killed in Baghdad since Saturday. Many more, the official said, have undoubtedly been wounded.
US military casualties, by contrast, have been relatively light by historical standards for urban combat. Two soldiers and two Marines were killed in separate attacks yesterday, with six others reported missing and more than 15 wounded.
Those combat deaths were not included in an official Pentagon accounting that listed 89 US fatalities
through Sunday, including 73 Americans killed in action and 16 who died in accidents or other incidents since the conflict began March 19. Seven troops are reported missing in action, and seven more are being held by the Iraqis as prisoners of war.
"I predicted there could be anywhere from 100 to 5,000 coalition soldiers killed," said Michael O'Hanlon, a military analyst at the Brookings Institution. "I saw the number 100 as almost as implausible as 5,000. I am very struck that we are at the lower end of what I thought was a wide plausible range."
With the long-awaited urban battle for Baghdad underway, increasing the potential for civilian causalities, there has been no reliable estimate of how many Iraqi civilians may have died in the fighting.
An international antiwar consortium, led by Marc Herold, an associate professor of economic development and international affairs at the University of New Hampshire, estimates that between 877 and 1,050
civilians have been killed, based on news reports from Iraq.
But there is no independent confirmation of that number from government sources or major nongovernmental organisations. During the war in Afghanistan, Herold's group was criticised for double or even triple counting of casualty reports.
William Arkin, an independent defence analyst said, "If your point here is to minimize civilian harm, you can't slaughter military people and think that you've evaded that issue.They all have families. If we leave thousands or tens of thousands of families without young men, we're going to pay a price in the postwar period."
Simpson, the WHO spokesman, echoed his concern. "It's very easy for the coalition to say we've only hit military targets, but you're still killing people, and people have families. If the aim of your military campaign is to win over the hearts and minds of the people, then killing large numbers of conscripts is not going to help."