Report: 25,000 Civilians Killed Since Iraq Invasion

The number of Iraqi civilians who met violent deaths in the two years after the US-led invasion was today put at 24,865 by an independent research team.

The figures, compiled from Iraqi and international media reports, found US and coalition military forces were responsible for 37% of the deaths, with anti-occupation forces and insurgents responsible for 9%. A further 36% were blamed on criminal violence.

Civilian deaths attributed to US and coalition military forces peaked in the invasion period from March to May 2003 - which accounts for 30% of all civilian deaths in the two-year period - but the longer-term trend has been for increasing numbers to die at the hands of insurgents.

Figures obtained last week from the Iraqi interior ministry put the average civilian and police officer death toll in insurgent attacks from August 2004 to March 2005 at 800 a month.

John Sloboda of the Iraq Body Count project, which co-authored the report with Oxford Research Group, said the Iraqi civilian death toll was the "forgotten cost" of the decision to go to war in Iraq.

"On average, 34 Iraqis every day have met violent deaths since the invasion of March 2003," he said at the launch of the report in London.

" Our data shows that no sector of Iraqi society has escaped. We sincerely hope this research will help to inform decision makers around the world about the real needs of the Iraqi people as they struggle to rebuild their country."

The Iraq Body Count project is the most complete attempt of its kind to record the civilian dead in Iraq. The researchers work from media reports, information from mortuary officials and on-the-ground research projects. Its figures, which the group regards as conservative estimates, do not include irregular fighters or others who died while attacking coalition or Iraqi government forces.

Neither the US nor the UK, the former occupying powers, provide figures for the numbers of Iraqi civilian dead.

The figures up to March 2005 do not include the period since the elected Shia-led government of Ibrahim al-Jaafari, the Iraqi prime minister, took office and the insurgency has worked at an increasing rate to kill Iraqi civilians and police officers.

In the past week, suicide bombers have wreaked havoc in Baghdad and towns in the so-called triangle of death, to the south of the capital. Bombers also struck with devastating effect in the northern cities of Kirkuk and Mosul.

In the deadliest bombing, one of at least 10 on Saturday, more than 98 people were killed and 130 injured in Musayyib, south of Baghdad, after a suicide bomber blew up a fuel tanker near a crowded marketplace and in front of a Shia mosque.

Insurgents today killed 13 people in an ambush on a bus carrying Iraqi workers to a US airbase north-east of Baghdad near the city of Baqouba. One of the 15 Sunni Arabs appointed to a committee to draft Iraq's constitution, Mijbil Issa, was later assassinated in a drive-by shooting with two companions in the Karradah area of Baghdad.

According to the Iraq Body Count report, 53% of those who died in the two years since the invasion were killed by explosive devices. Half of the total number died in Baghdad, and a fifth were women and children.

The deteriorating security situation has alarmed Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq's leading Shia cleric, who urged the Iraqi government to protect the people in "this genocidal war", according to the vice-president, Adil Abdul-Mahdi, who held a meeting with him at the weekend.

Moqtada al-Sadr, a Shia radical cleric, who last summer led a rebellion against US forces in the Shia holy city of Najaf, blamed the violence in Iraq on the presence of US and other foreign forces.

"The occupation in itself is a problem," he told BBC Newsnight last night. "Iraq not being independent is the problem. And the other problems stem from that - from sectarianism to civil war, the entire American presence causes this."

A report published last year in the medical journal the Lancet suggested the chances of a violent death in Iraq were 58 times higher after the invasion than before it.

Researchers from Johns Hopkins University and Columbia University in the US and the Al-Mustansiriya University in Baghdad put the civilian death toll at up to 100,000 since the invasion.

The study was based on interviews with Iraqis, most of them doctors, but conceded that the data on which the projections were based was of "limited precision".

These figures are a lot more reasonable than the 100,000 civilian dead figure that is frequently tossed about by leftists, but it's still troubling that 800 Iraqi civilians/police officers lose their lives through insurgent attacks every month in Iraq.

I'm wondering what the opinions are on this board. Are we making progress in Iraq or heading closer to Civil War? Has anyone seen any recent polls reflecting opinions in Iraq? Are they still relatively optimistic about the future of their country or has that changed at all? Are we going to be able to succeed with this "democracy experiment" or are our soldiers caught in the middle between two long-term sworn enemies----the Shias and the SUnnis?

Nobody on this board has access to the real info needed to determine if a civil war is in the cards. I do not believe for a second that we will be leaving Iraq any time this decade or the next.

Reason one: We are constructing at least 14 FOBs in ex-urban areas. These "hot lilly pad" type installations will house the logistical support needed to launch future major military operations in the region (part of the stated neo-con agenda)without having to ask permission of anybody or having to take six months to stockpile the materiel in theater.

Reason two: The Balkans. We were to be home ten years ago...ten. The moment the last GI boards the plane out Kosovo will explode in civil war, endangering the fragile peace in the other former Yugoslavia republics. That is why we are still there, the danger of a Lebanon-type civil war in Iraq is too real for us to pull out.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1440544/posts

A study released in March of 2003 by a British medical journal, the Lancet, showed that 100,000 civilians had been killed as a result of the US invasion. To be perfectly frank, it's hard to see how anyone who has even a passing familiarity with statistics could take Lancet's numbers seriously. Fred Kaplan from Slate explains:

"The authors of a peer-reviewed study, conducted by a survey team from Johns Hopkins University, claim that about 100,000 Iraqi civilians have died as a result of the war. Yet a close look at the actual study, published online today by the British medical journal the Lancet, reveals that this number is so loose as to be meaningless.
The report's authors derive this figure by estimating how many Iraqis died in a 14-month period before the U.S. invasion, conducting surveys on how many died in a similar period after the invasion began (more on those surveys later), and subtracting the difference. That difference—the number of "extra" deaths in the post-invasion period—signifies the war's toll. That number is 98,000. But read the passage that cites the calculation more fully:

We estimate there were 98,000 extra deaths (95% CI 8000-194 000) during the post-war period.

Readers who are accustomed to perusing statistical documents know what the set of numbers in the parentheses means. For the other 99.9 percent of you, I'll spell it out in plain English—which, disturbingly, the study never does. It means that the authors are 95 percent confident that the war-caused deaths totaled some number between 8,000 and 194,000. (The number cited in plain language—98,000—is roughly at the halfway point in this absurdly vast range.)

This isn't an estimate. It's a dart board.

Imagine reading a poll reporting that George W. Bush will win somewhere between 4 percent and 96 percent of the votes in this Tuesday's election. You would say that this is a useless poll and that something must have gone terribly wrong with the sampling. The same is true of the Lancet article: It's a useless study; something went terribly wrong with the sampling."

Bingo! What Lancet was in effect saying was that they believed 98,000 civilians died, but they might have been off by roughly 90,000 people or so in either direction.

Moreover, other sources at the time were coming in with numbers that were a tiny fraction of the 98,000 figure that the Lancet settled on. From a New York Times article on the Lancet study:

"The 100,000 estimate immediately came under attack. Foreign Secretary Jack Straw of Britain questioned the methodology of the study and compared it with an Iraq Health Ministry figure that put civilian fatalities at less than 4,000. Other critics referred to the findings of the Iraq Body Count project, which has constructed a database of war-related civilian deaths from verified news media reports or official sources like hospitals and morgues.
That database recently placed civilian deaths somewhere between 14,429 and 16,579, the range arising largely from uncertainty about whether some victims were civilians or insurgents. But because of its stringent conditions for including deaths in the database, the project has quite explicitly said, ''Our own total is certain to be an underestimate.''

Via GlobalSecurity.org, here's another Iraqi civilian death estimate:

"On 20 October 2003 the Project on Defense Alternatives estimated that between 10,800 and 15,100 Iraqis were killed in the war. Of these, between 3,200 and 4,300 were noncombatants -- that is: civilians who did not take up arms."
Given all that, how any informed person can buy into Lancet's numbers is simply beyond me.

Does someone have the time to do accurate statistics?

Calculate the average number of deaths per month for the time Sadam was in power... including the Iran Iraq war, genocide of Kurds, Failed Southern rebellion in '91, etc.

Then calculate the number of deaths per month from the start of the current campaign thru last month.

And sub-group the numbers by civilian deaths, military / in-uniform deaths, and terrorist/out-of-uniform combatant deaths.

What are the facts?

Category. . . . . . . . . . .Avg/Month. . Avg/Month
of Death . . . . . . . . . .1980-2002. . 2002-2005
Baathists/Terrorists killed_ _ _ _ _. . _ _ _ _ _
Enemy in Uniform(Iran, Italy,Spain,GB,Aus.....US)
Baathists/Terrorists killed_ _ _ _ _. . _ _ _ _ _
civilians.
Baathists killed by other. _ _ _ _ _. . _ _ _ _ _
Moslems (Iranians, etc.)

Coalition of Willing killed_ _ _ _ _. . _ _ _ _ _
Baathists/Terrorists in uniform
Coalition of Willing killed_ _ _ _ _. . _ _ _ _ _
civilians/collateral damage
Coalition of Willing killed_ _ _ _ _. . _ _ _ _ _
Terrorists out of uniform

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