IN THE LARGEST classified military leak in history, a barrage of almost 400,000 classified documents on the United States-led war in Iraq have been posted online by whistleblowing website WikiLeaks.
The documents – intended for publication at 10pm last night, though they were published shortly before that after al-Jazeera broke its embargo – confirm that Iran had been offering support and training to anti-US insurgency groups across Iraq, and that the United States had been all but dismissing hundreds of reports of prisoner abuse.
WikiLeaks said the documents “detail 109,032 deaths in Iraq, comprised of 66,081 ‘civilians’; 23,984 ‘enemy’ (those labeled as insurgents); 15,196 ‘host nation’ (Iraqi government forces) and 3,771 ‘friendly’ (coalition forces).
“The majority of the deaths (66,000, over 60%) of these are civilian deaths. That is 31 civilians dying every day during the six year period.
“For comparison, the ‘Afghan War Diaries’, previously released by WikiLeaks, covering the same period, detail the deaths of some 20,000 people. Iraq during the same period, was five times as lethal with equivallent population size.”
They also showed that in cases where the coalition-supported Iraqi authorities had been accused of excessive hardship and abuse, the coalition evidently pursued a policy of shrugging off the complaint and referring it back the body accused in the first place.
The Guardian – one of a number of media outlets given advance access to the documents – reported that in two cases, postmortems on Iraqi prisoners showed evidence of death by torture: one man, who police said had killed himself, had had “bruises and burns as well as visible injuries to the head, arm, torso, legs and neck“.
Another man was found to have “evidence of some type of unknown surgical procedure on [his] abdomen”. In his case, police said he had died of ‘bad kidneys’.
The New York Times, which was also given early access, focusses on the role of Iran and the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah in the training and support of insurgent fighters, with one leading Shiite militant trained by both the Islamic Revolutionary Guards and Hezbollah before being involved in the abduction of four American soldiers.
It also reports that many of the senior candidates running in Iraq’s parliamentary elections in 2005 were actually militiamen backed by Iran, in an attempt to give the more stable and fundamentalist Islamic neighbour a greater sway in the running of the post-Saddam Iraq.
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the United States would “condemn, in the most clear terms, the disclosure of any classified information by individuals and organisations which puts the lives of United States and partner service members and civilians at risk.”
The Iraqi government has told French news agency AFP that the documents revealed “no surprises”.
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