Baghdad, Iraq ? Someone has taped together the shredded binding, as if that could fix the horrors inside. There are pages bathed in dried, reddish-brown blood, their letters smeared and unintelligible.

The frantic scribblings and bloody handprints are a record of war.

This ledger at Kadhamiya General Hospital is one of dozens of documents reviewed by The Associated Press during a five-week period in an effort to count the civilian casualty toll from a month of fighting in Iraq.

The AP’s finding: At least 3,240 civilians died throughout the country, including 1,896 in Baghdad.

The count is still fragmentary, and the complete number — if it is ever tallied — is sure to be significantly higher.

Several surveys have looked at civilian casualties within Baghdad, but the AP’s is the first attempt to gauge the scale of such deaths from one end of the country to the other, from Mosul in the north to Basra in the south.

The AP count is based on records from 60 of Iraq’s 124 hospitals — including almost all of the large ones — and covers the period between March 20, when the war began, and April 20, when fighting was dying down. AP journalists visited all those hospitals, studying their logs, examining death certificates where available and interviewing officials.

Many of the 64 other hospitals are in small towns and were not visited because they are in dangerous or inaccessible areas. Some hospitals that were visited had incomplete or war-damaged casualty records.

Even if hospital records were complete, they would not tell the full story for this nation of 24 million people. Many dead were never taken to hospitals. They were either buried quickly by their families in accordance with Islamic custom, or lost under rubble.

The AP excluded all counts done by hospitals whose written records did not distinguish between civilian and military dead, which means hundreds, possibly thousands, of victims in Iraq’s largest cities and most intense battles aren’t reflected in the total.

Lt. Col. Jim Cassella, a Pentagon spokesman, said Tuesday that the U.S. military did not count civilian casualties. “Our efforts focus on destroying the enemy’s capabilities, so we never target civilians and have no reason to try to count such unintended deaths,” he said.

The British Defense Ministry said it didn’t count casualties either.

In the 1991 Gulf War an estimated 2,278 civilians were killed, according to Iraqi civil defense authorities. No official U.S. count is known to have been made. That war consisted of seven weeks of bombing and 100 hours of ground war, and did not take U.S. forces into any Iraqi cities.

This time it was very different. In a war in which Saddam Hussein’s soldiers melted away into crowded cities, changed into plain clothes or wore no uniform to begin with, separating civilian and military casualties was often impossible.

Adding to the civilian toll was the regime’s tactic of parking its troops and weapons in residential neighborhoods, creating targets for U.S. bombs that increased the casualties among noncombatants.

The reasons for some high-casualty incidents have yet to be fully resolved. For instance, on March 28 a missile landed on a sidewalk in a crowded marketplace in the Baghdad district of al-Shoala. Iraqi officials said 58 civilians were killed by a U.S. airstrike. Central Command said at the time that it was investigating, but spokesman Capt. John Morgan now says no inquiry was conducted. Centcom never confirmed nor denied firing the missile.

While the great majority of civilian deaths appear to have been caused by U.S. and British attacks, witnesses say some — even a rough estimate is impossible — were caused by the Iraqis themselves: by exploding Iraqi ammunition stored in residential neighborhoods, by falling Iraqi anti-aircraft rounds aimed at coalition warplanes, or by Iraqi fire directed at coalition troops.

The United States said its sophisticated weaponry minimized the toll, and around the country are sites that, to look at them, bolster the claim: missiles that tore deep into government buildings but left the surrounding houses untouched.

“Did the Americans bomb civilians? Yes. But one should be realistic,” said Dr. Hameed Hussein al-Aaraji, new director of Baghdad’s al-Kindi Hospital. “Saddam ran a dirty war. He put weapons inside schools, inside mosques. What could they do?”