100,000 civilians may have died in Iraq conflict: Study suggests most of those killed were women and children.
by Helen Pearson
As many as 100,000 civilians may have been killed as a consequence of the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, according to the first attempt at a systematic analysis, published on 29 October.
A US-Iraqi team led by health researcher Les Roberts of Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, interviewed nearly 1,000 Iraqi households in 33 randomly selected neighbourhoods across the country. They asked residents about the number and cause of deaths in each household in the 15 months before the March 2003 invasion, and the 18 months afterwards.
The group calculated that the risk of death went up by 2.5 times after the invasion. This gives an estimate of at least 100,000 more deaths since the war, and possibly many more. Most of the dead were women and children killed in military activity, particularly air strikes, the researchers report.
The results "demand a re-evaluation of the consequences of weaponry now used by coalition forces in populated areas", they write in The LANCET (1).
The LANCET's editor, Richard Horton, writes in an accompanying commentary (2): "This result requires an urgent political and military response if the confidence of ordinary Iraqis in the mostly American-British occupation is to be restored."
Hard task
Previous estimates of the Iraqi death toll, such as those based on collating news reports, vary from around 13,000 to more than 30,000. "These guys were trying to do a remarkably difficult thing in a dangerous environment," says Jon Alterman, director of the Middle East Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank based in Washington DC.
But Alterman questions the accuracy of the data. For example, two-thirds of the deaths were recorded in the exceptionally violent city of Falluja. "In general more data is good but fuzzy data doesn't help as much," he says.
The study's authors acknowledge that Falluja may not be representative of the rest of the country, and excluded those figures in their estimate. Including them gives a significantly higher death toll.
Horton accepts that more data would have made the results more accurate, but says that this would have involved "enormous and unacceptable" risk to the study's interviewers.
What if?
Alterman also points out that there were periods of mass killing before the recent Iraq war, such as during the Iran-Iraq war or in Saddam Hussein's attacks on the Kurds. It is difficult to predict whether the current conflict might have prevented similar incidents, he says.
Most people agree that civilian deaths during war should be minimized, Alterman adds, but the paper's calculations do not show how this might be done.
The report's authors argue that a necessary first step is for the occupying forces to carry out systematic body counts. "It seems difficult to understand how a military force could monitor the extent to which civilians are protected against violence without systematically doing body counts or at least looking at the kinds of casualties they induce," they write. "There seems to be little excuse for occupying forces to not be able to provide more precise tallies."
nature.com
References
1. Roberts, et al. Mortality before and after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: cluster sample surveyThe LANCET, 364 (9448), 20 Nov 2004: 1857-1864.
linkinghub.elsevier.com
2. Horton, Robert. The war in Iraq: civilian casualties, political responsibilities The LANCET, 364 (9448), 20 Nov 2004: 1831.
thelancet.com
The mujahadin are fighting in Iraq because the Americans occupy the country. Their methods are deplorable and horrific but they are fighting guerilla war because of the US presence. If the US were not occupying Iraq it would not be happening. Was it happening before bush invaded? |
