The Anonymous Casualties of War

Sept. 26, 2006 — -- As the number of casualties mounts daily, we all mourn the tragic losses of American service men and women in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The dispassionate statistics represent fathers, mothers, children, brothers and sisters who sacrificed their lives in support of the U.S. mission.

The statistics on Iraqi civilian violent deaths released last week by the United Nations are equally horrifying and overwhelming.

More than 3,000 innocent people -- their names and histories unknown to us -- were killed in August alone.

The British Web site, Iraq Body Count, estimates that as many as 48,000 civilians have been killed in Iraq since the war began in March 2003.

Violence in Afghanistan, where the death toll is murky at best, is resurging.

Most of these deaths have been at the hands of the insurgency in Iraq and the Taliban in Afghanistan -- but not all.

Many Americans are left feeling helpless when they hear news of the latest macabre figures.

I can't help but think of Marla Ruzicka, the 28-year-old human rights advocate who dedicated her life to helping the surviving family members of innocent men, women and children caught in U.S. crossfire on the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq.

The door-to-door civilian casualty surveys she conducted in the early phases of both wars led to groundbreaking legislation worth $45 million in assistance for civilian victims of war.

Inspiring, yes. Enough, not nearly.

Marla pushed on, insisting that the Pentagon release records on the dead, wounded and dispossessed.

With accurate information, she argued, the United States, along with humanitarian organizations, could better assist civilians accidentally harmed in the lethal crossfire.

Time and again, she was told that no such records existed.

In April of last year, Marla finally received the most promising evidence supporting her deeply held belief that a mountain of official civilian casualty statistics was being shrouded by the fog of war.

Marla had befriended a high-ranking U.S. military official in Iraq who disclosed to her that 29 civilians had been killed by small-arms fire in skirmishes between U.S. troops and insurgents in Baghdad during a specific narrow window of time.

The figures were limited in their geography and time frame, making them useless as a statistical indicator, but they did achieve one thing of fundamentally critical importance -- they proved that the U.S. military in Iraq was keeping its own body count.

A few days later, Marla's quest to unearth more extensive data was brutally cut short when a suicide bomber ended her life on Baghdad's Airport Road.

Jennifer Abrahamson is an author and freelance journalist based in Brooklyn, N.Y. She has also worked for the United Nations in Africa and Afghanistan, which is where she first met Marla Ruzicka in 2002. Abrahamson and Ruzicka began collaborating on "Sweet Relief: The Marla Ruzicka Story" only months before Marla was killed by an IED in Iraq.