Civilian Casualties in Iraq?
We have a densely argued discussion of the available evidence andliterature review in footnote number 30 of our open letter:
(Why does the link for footnote 30 ends in "note-29". I think I blame computer scientists who like to begin counting at 0 rather than 1.)
(If you go there, all the references are hyperlinked, they are not here)
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See Opinion Research Business and Just Foreign Policy for these estimates. This far exceeds the Iraq Body Count number of around 90,000, which only counts deaths reported by multiple crosschecked media reports: see their information page. The US government has not made any serious study of deaths in Iraq during the war and occupation. Perhaps the closest is Measuring Stability and Security in Iraq, Report to Congress by Department of Defense, September 2008, at p.22. However, as noted in the December 2007 version of this report, there are many deaths for which "the Coalition does not have visibility, in particular, murders and deaths in locations where Coalition forces are not present": at p.18. See the Congressional Research Service report Iraqi Civilian Casualties Estimates, Hannah Fischer, January 12, 2009, for some further discussion. The Just Foreign Policy figure is an extrapolation of an epidemiological-style cluster study study published in the prestigious British medial journal The Lancet, which obtained a figure of 426,000-794,000 for the period March 2003 - July 2006: Gilbert Burnham, Riyadh Lafta, Shannon Doocy et al., "Mortality After the 2003 Invasion of Iraq: A Cross-Sectional Cluster Sample Survey," The Lancet, October 21, 2006, 368 (9545), pp. 1421-1429. The UK Ministry of Defence's chief scientific advisor called the survey "close to best practice" and "robust": High Death Toll Backed, Newsday, March 27, 2007.
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The Just Foreign Policy website estimate is currently 1,320,110... it's a rough estimate based on extrapolation from the Lancet study.
http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/iraq/iraqdeaths.html
posted by dan at
8:41 PM
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100,000 Civilian Deaths Estimated in Iraq
One of the first attempts to independently estimate the loss of civilian life from the Iraqi war has concluded that at least 100,000 Iraqi civilians may have died because of the U.S. invasion.
The analysis, an extrapolation based on a relatively small number of documented deaths, indicated that many of the excess deaths have occurred due to aerial attacks by coalition forces, with women and children being frequent victims, wrote the international team of public health researchers making the calculations
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