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100,000 Iraq civilians killed in war, study says
Questions raised about small size of research sample
Rob Stein, Washington Post
Friday, October 29, 2004
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Washington -- 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 actual documented deaths, indicated that many of the 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 who made the calculations.
Pentagon officials say they do not keep tallies of civilian casualties, and a spokesman said Thursday there is no way to validate estimates by others. The past 18 months of fighting in Iraq have been "prosecuted in the most precise fashion of any conflict in the history of modern warfare," and "the loss of any innocent lives is a tragedy, something that Iraqi security forces and the multinational force painstakingly work to avoid," the spokesman said.
Previous independent estimates of civilian deaths in Iraq have been far lower, never exceeding 16,000, and other experts immediately challenged the new estimate, saying the small number of actual documented deaths upon which it was based made the conclusions suspect.
"The methods that they used are certainly prone to inflation due to overcounting," said Marc Garlasco, senior military analyst for Human Rights Watch, which investigated the number of civilian deaths that occurred during the invasion. "These numbers seem to be inflated."
The estimate is based on a door-to-door survey conducted in September of 988 Iraqi households containing 7,868 people in 33 neighborhoods selected to provide a representative sampling. Two survey teams gathered detailed information about the date, cause and circumstances of any deaths in the 14.6 months before the invasion and the 17.8 months after it, documenting the fatalities with death certificates in most cases.
The project was designed by Les Roberts and Gilbert Burnham of the Center for International Emergency, Disaster and Refugee Studies at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore; Richard Garfield of Columbia University in New York; and Riyadh Lafta and Jamal Kudhairi of the Al- Mustansiriya University College of Medicine in Baghdad.
Based on the number of Iraqi fatalities recorded by the survey teams, the researchers calculated that the death rate had increased from 5 percent annually to 7.9 percent since the invasion. That works out to an excess of about 100,000 deaths since the war, the researchers reported in a paper released early by the Lancet, a British medical journal.
The researchers called their estimate conservative because they excluded deaths in Fallujah, a city west of Baghdad that has been the scene of particularly intense fighting and accounted for a disproportionately large number of the deaths in the survey.
"We are quite confident that there's been somewhere in the neighborhood of 100,000 deaths, but it could be much higher," Roberts said.
When the researchers examined the specific causes of the 73 violent deaths collected in the study, 84 percent were due to the actions of coalition forces, although the researchers stressed that none were the result of what would have been considered misconduct. Ninety-five percent were due to air strikes by helicopter gunships, rockets or other types of aerial weaponry.
Forty-six percent of the violent deaths involving coalition forces were men ages 15 to 60, but 46 percent were children younger than 15, and 7 percent were women, the researchers reported.
The researchers and the editors at the Lancet acknowledged that the study had clear limitations, including a relatively small sample of violent deaths that were examined directly and the researchers' reliance on individual memories for some of the information. But the researchers said the findings represented the most reliable estimate to date.
Roberts, the lead researcher from Johns Hopkins, said the timing of the article's release was up to him.
"I e-mailed it in on Sept. 30 under the condition that it came out before the election," Roberts told the Associated Press. "My motive in doing that was not to skew the election. My motive was that if this came out during the campaign, both candidates would be forced to pledge to protect civilian lives in Iraq."
