LONDON: WikiLeaks said Saturday its release of nearly 400,000 classified US files on the Iraq war showed 15,000 more Iraqi civilians died than previously thought. Uploaded on the WikiLeaks' website, the files detailed gruesome cases of prisoner abuse by Iraqi forces that the US military knew about but did not seem to investigate. In Baghdad, Iraqi officials responded to WikiLeaks' move by pledging to probe any allegations that police or soldiers had committed crimes and saying any culprits would be prosecuted. The whistle-blowing website's founder, Julian Assange, who was sharply criticized by the Pentagon for publishing the secret reports, said the release should throw light on what had happened in Iraq, thwarting an official “attack on the truth”. “We hope to correct some of that attack on the truth that occurred before the war, during the war and which has continued on since the war officially concluded,” he told a news conference in London. Working with Iraq Body Count, a group run by academics and peace activists that estimates Iraq casualties, WikiLeaks had calculated that the documents revealed about 15,000 previously unknown civilian deaths, Assange said. “Adding in the combatant deaths reported in these logs ... we are now able to say that more than 150,000 people have been killed in total since 2003, of which about 80 percent were civilians,” Iraq Body Count co-founder John Sloboda said. The Pentagon decried the website's publication of the secret reports – the largest security breach of its kind in US military history, far surpassing the group's dump of more than 70,000 Afghan war files in July. US officials said the leak endangered US troops and threatened to put some 300 Iraqi collaborators at risk by exposing their identities. WikiLeaks said it had edited out sensitive information and was confident the documents contained no detail that could lead to anyone being harmed.United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture Manfred Nowak urged US President Barack Obama to order an investigation. “There is an obligation to investigate whenever there are credible allegations that torture has happened and those allegations are more than credible, and then it is up to the courts,” he told the BBC. Phil Shiner, a lawyer representing Iraqi civilians who allege they have been tortured or harmed, said the documents reinforced his call for a judicial inquiry into British responsibility for civilian deaths in Iraq.
