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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Thursday, October 23, 2003

Frequent cases of suicide seen in US troops in Iraq

In the past seven months, the US troops stationed in Iraq have seen 11 army men and three marine corps soldiers end their lives by committing suicide, bringing the suicide rate of US forces in Iraq to 1.7 per ten thousand, the Washington Post lately quoted a psychiatrist in the military as saying. The suicides have drawn attention from senior political and military leaders, and hundreds of mental disease doctors have been sent from the United States to Iraq.


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In the past seven months, the US troops stationed in Iraq have seen 11 army men and three marine corps soldiers end their lives by committing suicide, bringing the suicide rate of US forces in Iraq to 1.7 per ten thousand, the Washington Post lately quoted a psychiatrist in the military as saying. The suicides have drawn attention from senior political and military leaders, and hundreds of mental disease doctors have been sent from the United States to Iraq.

Within the United States, the "subsistence condition" of US troops in Iraq has become a hot topic of mainstream media. According to VOA reports on October 18, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff General Richard B. Myers, said they are watching closely the problem of low morale appeared in the 10,000-odd US soldiers in Iraq. In an informal survey conducted by Star and Stripes, a semi-official newspaper, one-third soldiers surveyed said frankly his morale is low or very low.

The Washington Post ran a similar story on October 16, saying the Bush administration had recently launched a campaign criticizing the media for describing the situation in Iraq in a negative light. Bush described the military spirit as high and said that the situation in Iraq is "much better than imagined��. However, a broad survey conducted among US soldiers in Iraq showed that nearly half questioned described their morale as low and training as insufficient. About one-third complained about their mission as lacking a clear definition and the launch of the Iraqi war as lacking any value or no value at all. This conflicts sharply with the military statements.

"The numbers are consistent with what I suspect is going on there," said David Segal, a military sociologist with the University of Maryland at College Park. "I am getting a sense that there is a high and increasing level of demoralization and a growing sense of being in something they don't understand and aren't sure the American people understand." The Washington Post also reveled that "many soldiers -- including several officers -- allege that VIP visits from the Pentagon and Capitol Hill are only given hand-picked troops to meet with during their tours of Iraq," and "the phrase 'Dog and Pony Show' is usually used. Some troops even go so far as to say they've been ordered not to talk to VIPs because leaders are afraid of what they might say."

During the five months flowing Bush��s announcement of the end of major operations in Iraq, the US deployed troops didn��t pass a single day without encountering attacks. The average rate increased to over 20 times a day lately. The US army is fighting the hardest battle in Iraq since the Vietnam War, for they cannot tell which is the front and which is the rear, worrying about being attacked at any minute.

The US troops stationed in Iraq, having been fighting for a long time on foreign land and seeing no date of returning home, are under tremendous mental pressure, experts say. Due to lack of men for rotation, many soldiers serve much longer than their due term. A lot of them suffered physically and mentally. Depression is rampant, which, on top of the hard and dangerous environment, leads easily to mental disorders, even suicide. The psychiatrists, no matter how many in number, could ease the problem for but the moment. More soldiers are likely to fall victim to distress or suicide if the US military fail to pull out its army early enough.

It is under such a pressure that the US military decided to cut from next year its troops in Iraq from the current 130,000 to fewer than 10,000, and shift more duties to Iraqi security forces and peacekeeping troops from other countries.

By People's Daily Online


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