Iraq: Civilian cost of war may never be known

The number of civilians killed in the Iraq war is incalculable.

The lack of records, the displacement of more than four million Iraqis from their homes, and the problems posed by collecting data from a war zone have led to the figures for civilian deaths varying widely, from around 85,000 to 655,000.

The Iraq Body Count, which bases its numbers on media reports, said between 82,349 to 89,867 civilians have been reported killed due to violent incidents since the start of the war in March 2003 and February 21, the latest date for which data has been analysed.

The British-based organisation said the initial six-week invasion alone caused around 7,350 deaths, with a further 5,000 during the rest of 2003.

The following year saw around 10,500 violent deaths reported, followed by 14,500 in 2005, 27,500 in 2006 and 24,000 last year.

Since 2003, more than 50 attacks have each killed more than 50 people, with more than a dozen killing 100 or more.

In October last year, the Iraq Body Count’s researchers said Iraqis were dying at more than three times the rate before the 2003 invasion.

Its figures showed 2007 saw not only the worst bombings, but also more of them.

In one of the worst incidents of violence during the war, more than 500 civilians were killed by suicide fuel tanker bombs in Yasidi villages in the Sinjar area of Iraq last August.

The latest estimate from the World Health Organisation (WHO) puts the number of civilian deaths at 151,000 between the start of the war and June 2006.

The Iraq Body Count said 47,668 civilians died during the same period as the WHO study.

The WHO said that “in the absence of comprehensive death registration and hospital reporting, household surveys are the best we can do” and their work was complicated by problems collecting data in a war zone.

One of the reports co-authors, Louay Hakki Rasheed, was killed on his way to work on August 2, 2007.

Other problems include the fact that many bodies, if they are identifiable, are taken directly to a cemetery, bypassing hospitals and the morgue, where the figures could be recorded.

The WHO study, which was published in the New England Journal of Medicine in January, found more than half the violent deaths in Iraq occurred in Baghdad.

Researchers interviewed families and said there was a 95% degree of statistical certainty that between 104,000 and 223,000 civilians had died.

But the study ended before the period of what is believed to be the worst sectarian killings, many prompted by the bombing of a Shiite shrine in Samarra, during the latter half of 2006 and the first eight months of 2007.

And a John Hopkins study estimated as many as 654,965 more Iraqis may have died between the start of hostilities in March 2003 and October 2006 than would have been expected under pre-war conditions.

But the methods used by its researchers have been criticised and it involved only one-fifth the number of households and one-twentieth the number of areas surveyed by the WHO study.

In total, around 2.5% of the Iraqi population were said to have perished as a result of the war, mostly through violence, the study said.

President George Bush dismissed the estimate, saying it was not “credible”.

The study, by researchers at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland, US, working with colleagues in Baghdad, was published in the Lancet medical journal.

The Pentagon does not keep a record of civilian deaths.