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WOLF BLITZER: Meanwhile,
there are stunning new claims today about the toll
being taken by the war in Iraq.
And joining us now from Baghdad our correspondent
Michael Ware. Michael, The Associated Press now
quoting the Iraqi health minister as saying that
during the course of this war in Iraq, three and a
half years, 150,000 Iraqi civilians have died, have
been killed. An enormous number by all accounts.
MICHAEL WARE, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Absolutely Wolf.
And, I mean, this has been one of the impossible to
tell stories of this war. Just how many Iraqi
civilians have died in the course of collateral
damage from military operations, in sectarian
violence, in the course of the insurgency and suicide
bombings? It's a very, very hard thing to gauge.
And numbers conflict everywhere. We have seen more
conservative estimates that put it in the tens of
thousands, 40-50,000. Many people settle on a figure
around 100,000. Be it the Iraqi health minister or
not -- and we must be aware that the Health Ministry
is now owned and run by the political faction
belonging to anti-American rebel cleric Muqtada
al-Sadr -- its figures itself are difficult to work
from, and have been questioned in the past.
Nonetheless, it's very, very clear, certainly to
Iraqis here on the ground, almost everyone has been
touched by this war in one way or another. Each
family has felt some kind of loss -- Wolf.
BLITZER: And this comes on the heels, Michael, of a
United Nations report that estimates that nearly a
million Iraqis, more than 900,000, have been
displaced since the start of the war, forced to flee
their homes, now living elsewhere in various parts of
Iraq or going to neighboring Jordan or Syria or Iran
or Saudi Arabia or other countries in the region.
Nearly a million Iraqis forced to flee their homes.
Do you get that sense as well just being there?
WARE: You very much do. I mean there's a sense of --
there's people on the move. But I mean, it all comes
from this atmosphere of fear, tension and
apprehension. I mean, this is what is driving people
from their homes. We also see this is what's driving
the intelligentsia out of the country. Universities
-- students no longer go to universities for fear of
the violence that may happen.
University professors no longer show up. So many of
them have been assassinated. So we're seeing -- it's
things like this, where life just can't continue
that's driving people out of the country. There's
internally displaced in the hundreds of thousands and
there are those who have actually left. And we're
hearing from U.N. agencies and others that they're
simply not geared up to be able to support these
enormous numbers, Wolf.
BLITZER: Michael Ware reporting for us from Baghdad.
Michael, thank you.
WARE: Thank you, Wolf.