Report says at least 719 Iraq ‘rebuilders’ have died

WASHINGTON – In the first tally of its kind, a federal investigative agency has calculated that at least 719 people, nearly half of them Americans, were killed working on projects to rebuild Iraq following the U.S. invasion in 2003.

The toll represents an aspect of the Iraq war that is rarely brought to public attention, overshadowed by the much higher number killed in combat as well as the billions of taxpayer dollars squandered on reconstruction.

There is no confirmed total number of Iraq war deaths. The U.S. military lost 4,488 in Iraq, and its allies a little over 300. The number of Iraqi deaths has not been established but is thought to exceed 100,000.

Navy Cmdr. Duane G. Wolfe was among the 719. He was not fighting the insurgency, but it was fighting him.

He was among the army of lawyers, engineers, contractors and others who paid a heavy price trying to put a broken Iraq and its shattered economy back together. Their deaths were recorded among the war’s combat fatalities, but until now no one has carved out the “rebuilder” deaths as a subset of the overall casualty list.

Wolfe was killed on May 25, 2009, in a roadside bombing while returning to Baghdad after inspecting a wastewater treatment plant under construction near Fallujah in Iraq’s western province of Anbar. The $100 million project endured long delays and large cost overruns, and a U.S. federal audit last fall concluded that it probably was not worth the cost. The audit said “many” people died getting it built, but it did not say how many.

The 54-year-old Wolfe, a Navy reservist, was running the Army Corps of Engineers’ office in Anbar at the time of his death; in civilian life he worked at Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif. Two other U.S. civilians – Terry Barnich, 56, of the State Department, and Maged Hussein, 43, of the Army Corps – died in the same bombing.

The actual number of people killed doing reconstruction work is probably much higher than 719 but cannot be reliably determined, the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction said in releasing its estimate today.

The 719 include U.S. government civilians, private contractors, military members, Iraqi civilian workers and third-country nationals. They were trainers, inspectors, auditors, advisers, interpreters and others whose mission was directly tied to the largely ad hoc reconstruction effort that began early in the war. They helped restore Iraq’s dilapidated electrical grid, improve its oil infrastructure, develop a justice system, modernize a banking system, set up town councils and reopen hospitals, training centers and schools.

They also helped recruit and train Iraqi police, and they advised the Iraqi army.