Graphic accounts of torture, civilian killings and Iran's hand in the Iraq war are detailed in hundreds of thousands of US military documents made public on the whistleblower website WikiLeaks.
Across nearly 400,000 pages of secret military field reports spanning five years, the largest military leak in history, a grisly picture emerges of years of blood and suffering following the 2003 US invasion to oust Saddam Hussein.
Website founder Julian Assange said the files reveal a “bloodbath” in previously unseen detail.
“We're talking about a five times greater kill rate in Iraq, really a comparative bloodbath compared to Afghanistan.”
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| The Al-Jazeera television channel website displaying news coverage on secret US documents obtained by WikiLeaks, is seen on a computer screen at a cafe in Silver Spring, Maryland, on October 22, 2010. (AFP) |
WikiLeaks made the files available to the Guardian newspaper, the New York Times, Le Monde and Der Spiegel weeks ago
The Guardian newspaper said the leak showed “US authorities failed to investigate hundreds of reports of abuse, torture, rape and even murder by Iraqi police and soldiers whose conduct appears to be systematic and normally unpunished.”It added that “more than 15,000 civilians died in previously unknown incidents,” going on to say that “US and UK officials have insisted that no official record of civilian casualties exists but the logs record 66,081 non-combatant deaths out of a total of 109,000 fatalities.
” And the Guardian said the “numerous” reports of detainee abuse, often supported by medical evidence, “describe prisoners shackled, blindfolded and hung by wrists or ankles, and subjected to whipping, punching, kicking or electric shocks.” It added: “Six reports end with a detainee's apparent death.”
The Guardian said WikiLeaks is thought to have obtained the electronic archive from the “same dissident US army intelligence analyst”.
Al-Jazeera concluded that major findings of the leaked papers included a US military cover-up of Iraqi state-sanctioned torture and “hundreds” of civilians deaths at manned American checkpoints after the US-led invasion of 2003.
The documents describe Iran arming and training Iraqi hit squads to carry out attacks on coalition troops and Iraqi government officials, with the elite Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps suspected of playing a crucial role, the Times and the Guardian reported, citing the files.
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