Last week the US lost its 1,000th soldier killed in combat. Why did no one notice?

Because the coalition wants to play down the carnage. Especially when it comes to civilians

A deadly milestone was reached in Iraq last week, and hardly anyone noticed. Captain Mark Stubenhofer of the US army's 41st Infantry Regiment, killed in a firefight on a street in Baghdad on Tuesday, was the 1,000th American to die in combat since the country was invaded nearly 21 months ago - yet none of the reports of his death mentioned the fact.

The reason? Only one news agency spotted that the Pentagon's official tally of deaths in action had reached 999, and that its latest casualty announcement meant that the toll was now in four figures. And when Capt Stubenhofer's name was released later, after his family had been informed, no news organisation made the connection, not even The Washington Post, which carried a story because his home town - Springfield, Virginia - is in its circulation area.

The Post reported that Capt Stubenhofer, 30, had last spoken to his parents when he called from Iraq to tell them his wife had had their third child, a daughter. "He never got to see her, though. She'll only know him through us," his mother, Sallie Stubenhofer, told the newspaper. It was his second tour of duty in Iraq; during his first he was awarded the Bronze Star.

Thanks to a website that meticulously records coalition casualties, icasualties.org, we can see that Capt Stubenhofer was older and more senior than most US soldiers killed in Iraq, and that Baghdad, where he died, has claimed more American lives than anywhere else in the country. But because the most significant statistic was missed, there was no analysis of the cost of the conflict so far.

Two years ago, when the rush to war was becoming unstoppable, would we have thought twice if we had known how many Iraqis and non-Iraqis would die or be damaged? This question was not asked on the occasion of Mark Stubenhofer's death: and that is exactly how the Pentagon and the Ministry of Defence want it.

In the debate over casualties, the only clear-cut figures are those on coalition deaths, because the British and US governments know it would be impossible to suppress them. But as icasualties.org makes clear, the Pentagon "certainly doesn't go out of its way to divulge" the number of losses. "We are told that during the Korean and Vietnam wars, the names and numbers of dead AND injured were available from the government," it adds. "No longer."

In 2003 the White House issued a directive banning reporters from attending the return of coffins containing the bodies of US troops to Dover Air Force base in Delaware. A Freedom of Information Act loophole, which forced the release of some photographs of such returns, was closed, and a civilian worker who took pictures of coffins aboard an aircraft in Kuwait was sacked.

The British, says the website, "do a much better job with their dead", listing in one place all those lost in the war - though this is clearly easier when the toll is much lower than in the US. There are photographs of the ceremonial return of coffins; the MoD posts the names, pictures and brief biographies, with tributes, of every dead serviceman and woman on its website within a day or two of their death.

What neither Britain nor the US wants, however, is for anyone to dwell on the much greater numbers of military personnel who have returned with physical or mental injuries. Thanks to medical advances, particularly in battlefield treatment, for every US soldier killed in Iraq nine more have been wounded and survived, the highest ratio ever. But media access to military hospitals such as Walter Reed in Washington or Landstuhl in Germany is tightly controlled. Officials at Landstuhl said last month that doctors had treated 17,878 injured or sick US troops from Iraq.

Getting figures from the MoD about the exact number of British injured in the Iraq conflict is very difficult, and no breakdown on the cause of those injuries is obtainable. Official figures are patchy.

The MoD claims releasing casualty data - even rounded-up figures on the type or cause of injuries - breaches patient confidentiality. It says the Defence Medical Services Department insists on this. A spokesman added: "As there is, therefore, no need to collate this information centrally, this is not done."

James Bond, an expert on military compensation claims at the Royal British Legion, the UK's largest ex-services welfare agency, retorted: "Of all the excuses one could think of, that's probably the worst. I don't see how the general release of statistics will affect anybody's recovery. What it will affect, of course, which may be more to the point, is morale - both within the services and in particular the service families. They would reveal that the risks of people getting injured are actually quite high. It's a morale issue rather than a medical issue."

Commodore Toby Elliott, the chief executive of Combat Stress, the main charity for mentally ill ex-servicemen, was more blunt, calling the MoD's stance "a load of bullshit". The MoD as well as those involved in the care of service casualties need the figures, he said.

At least the coalition members collect figures for their own casualties. What outraged a group of more than 40 diplomats, peers, scientists and churchmen who petitioned Tony Blair last week is that they make no effort to count the far higher totals of Iraqi civilians killed and injured. The Prime Minister brushed off their demand for an independent inquiry into the toll, saying figures from the Iraqi Ministry of Health "are in our view the most accurate survey there is".

But the ministry, which says 3,853 civilians were killed between April and October this year, has no figures for the preceding period, and many of those killed in Iraq never go to a hospital. Since it is well known that civilians were an increasing proportion of fatalities in conflicts during the 20th century - rising from 15 per cent in the First World War to 90 per cent in the "low-intensity" wars in Africa, East Timor and the former Yugoslavia, according to Barbara Ehrenreich in her 1997 book, Blood Rites - it is hard to escape the conclusion that Washington and London simply do not want to know the figures, to avoid the political fallout they could create.

The thinking became clear from the response of a spokeswoman for the Pentagon, Lt-Col Ellen Krenke, when The Independent on Sunday asked about numbers of Iraqi dead. "It is something that is not done," she said. "We just never have. We keep count of our own, but not the enemy." We were asking about civilians, we pointed out. "No," she said, "we don't do that either."

Additional reporting by Cub Barrett

COUNTING THE COST

1,428

The total of coalition soldiers killed in Iraq by combat and other causes, including accidents. Britain has lost 74 troops, 37 in action; at least 190 non-Iraqi civilian contractors have also died.

98,000

The minimum estimate of "additional deaths" among Iraqi civilians caused by the war, according to a study whose methods have been attacked by the Government. Iraqbodycount.net, which uses press reports and other data, has a much lower estimate of 14,620 to 16,805, but says it is hampered by deteriorating security. Other estimates are 10,000 to 27,000 (Brookings Institution) and at least 37,000 (People's Kifah, an Iraqi group).

2,754

The number of troops medically evacuated to Britain up to 18 November. By 31 August, 79 soldiers had been medically retired, including 19 with mental illness and 27 with accidental injuries. The MoD could not give us more up-to-date figures.

461

The official figure for British personnel in Iraq diagnosed with mental health problems, including 52 with post-traumatic stress disorder. But that was only up until February; welfare organisations estimate the total is now at least 800.

The British casualty

Private Graham Craddock doesn't know if he is still a soldier or not. The reservist believes he has been "cut adrift" by the Army since he was evacuated from Iraq. He has since been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.

"The PTSD is from what I saw out there," he says. "At hospital I saw Iraqi children with limbs missing. At the same time 1 Para were attacked and were rushed in, and I saw all that. I have flashbacks, I sweat at night. I have antidepressants during the day, plus painkillers for joint and muscle aches. At night I have sedatives."

In civilian life Pte Craddock, who lives in Nottingham with his wife and two children, was a transport administrator. But he had been in the Territorial Army for 18 months. He continues: "In May last year I was called up. We flew from RAF Brize Norton and were put straight to work.

"I drove a water tanker to army camps. I wasn't drinking enough fluids and went down with heat injury.They thought I might have renal failure, so I was medically evacuated."

When he arrived home Pte Craddock says it was left to his civilian GP to diagnose PTSD.

"I got demobilised [from the regular Army, which a TA member is deemed to have joined once on active service]," he says. "Two weeks later I got a letter saying I was being remobilised. Then I got a letter saying I was being discharged on 11 August this year.

"Then two friends from my TA unit came to collect my kit and gave me a form which they had been told they had to bring back signed, saying I was being voluntarily discharged. I refused to sign. I feel used."

Andrew Johnson

The American casualty

Nadia McCaffrey's son, Patrick, a member of the California National Guard, was killed on 22 June this year when his unit was ambushed in the city of Balad, 85 miles north of Baghdad. In January Mrs McCaffrey will join other American mothers whose sons have died in combat and travel to Iraq to meet relatives of Iraqis who have been killed by the US and British invasion.

"We will be mothers [speaking] to mothers," she said. "I don't know [why there is less discussion of civilian casualties]. It is very disturbing."

Mrs McCaffrey said her son, who left a widow and two children, often wrote to her about the Iraqi people, especially the young children who gave him flowers. When her son's body was returned to Sacramento airport she defied President Bush's wishes by allowing the media to film it.

She also talked of her son's despair at the US presence in Iraq. "He was overwhelmed by the hatred there for Americans and Europeans," she told one reporter. "He was so ashamed by the [Abu Ghraib] prisoner abuse scandal. He even sent me an email to tell me that not all the soldiers were like that. He said we had no business in Iraq and should not be there. Even so, he wanted to be a good soldier."

Mrs McCaffrey said she and the other mothers may not be able to enter Iraq because of the lack of security. If not, there are plans to establish a peace camp at Amman, Jordan's capital.

Andrew Buncombe

The Iraqi casualty

During the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, Ali Midhat Abed Jassim, now 39, was conscripted into the Iraqi army and was wounded in the right leg by a shell. It left him with a permanent limp, but he survived living on his disability pension and earning a little money through a small business buying and selling goods. He married and had one child. He recalls: "When the Americans came I expected life would get better. I did not expect such disasters." At 6am on 3 December his wife heard a loud explosion outside his house in Baghdad and woke him up. Mr Jassim heard that somebody had detonated a bomb beside a Shia mosque nearby. Unwisely he went outside to see for himself what was happening. He could see a car was on fire.

"People were trying to put out the blaze," he recalls from his bed in a Baghdad hospital. "There was a second explosion. I was driven to hospital with a woman who was also hurt by the blast. They cut off my left leg, which was not the one injured in the war with Iran." Mr Jassim can hardly bear to think about the future. He has a pension of 115,000 Iraqi dinars ($75) a month but rent alone is 200,000 dinars. Many of his relatives lived in the same street and four were killed, four injured, in the explosion. "I can't bear to think about anything," he said as he prepared for an operation, his third since the explosion.

Patrick Cockburn