In an exclusive for IraqMortality.org Milan Rai, Author of War Plan Iraq, Regime Unchanged, and Chomsky's Politics gives indepth analysis of the three major mortality studies conducted in Iraq; Iraq Body Count, The Lancet, and The UNDP Report. This document is presented to help activists more fully understand the differences and similarities between these studies.
For five days, begining on October 24th, almost 100 grassroots groups and individual activists in the US, UK, and Switzerland will toll a bell in their communities for Iraqis who have lost their lives in this war and for the families and loved ones they have left behind. This tolling of bells will also usher in the one year anniversary of the publishing of The Lancet Study on October 29th which estimates 100,000 Iraqi deaths due to the war and occupation.
INTRODUCTION
As the death toll in Iraq continues to grow, one question haunting the debate over the occupation is the scale of this loss. Supporters of the continuing war seek to confuse and obscure the issue by presenting existing estimates as in conflict with each other. However, when we examine the best-known Iraq mortality estimates, we find that they tend to support rather than contradict each other.
All known estimates agree that the death rate in Iraq, especially the rate of violent death, has increased dramatically since the US/UK invasion in March 2003. They all indicate that number of ‘excess deaths’ (deaths that would not have occurred if not for the war) is staggeringly high.
IRAQ BODY COUNT
The first authoritative, and still constantly-updated, estimate of war-related deaths in Iraq was compiled by Iraq Body Count (IBC). In July 2005, IBC issued a dense, readable analysis of recorded civilian deaths due to the invasion and occupation of Iraq from March 2003 to March 2005. Careful and conservative work by IBC principal researchers Hamit Dardagan, John Sloboda, Kay Williams and Peter Bagnall, showed that there had been 24,865 civilian war-related deaths, almost all of them as a direct result of violence, reported between 20 March 2003 and 19 March 2005.
In order to provide irrefutable, minimum figures for the death toll, IBC only records civilian deaths which have been reported by two reputable English-language sources.
IBC observed in its June 2005 report: ‘The population of Iraq is approximately 25,000,000, meaning that one in every thousand Iraqis has been violently killed since March 2003.’
