October 11, 2006
By SABRINA TAVERNISE and DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.
New York Times
BAGHDAD, Oct. 10 — A team of American and Iraqi public health researchers has estimated that 600,000 civilians have died in violence across Iraq since the 2003 American invasion, the highest estimate ever for the toll of the war here.
Report, IRIN
14 December 2005
BAGHDAD -- A Washington-based humanitarian organisation urged the US government this week to accurately count and identify all civilian casualties of the US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq, following a recent announcement by US President George Bush that 30,000 Iraqi civilians had been killed to date.
"CIVIC believes the US military needs to keep statistics on civilian casualties, particularly those caused by US actions in Iraq," read a statement from the Campaign for Innocent Victims of Conflict (CIVIC).
Tara Sutton, Acting Field Director of CIVIC, said she believed that records were only being kept "to a certain extent" in the form of "after-incident reports" filed by the US military after any armed engagement.
Source: The Independent
by Robert Fisk
August 17, 2005
Bodies of 1,100 civilians brought to mortuary in July Pre-invasion, July figure was typically less than 200 Last Sunday alone, the mortuary received 36 bodies Up to 20 per cent of the bodies are never identified Many of the dead have been tortured or disfigured
The Baghdad morgue is a fearful place of heat and stench and mourning, the cries of relatives echoing down the narrow, foetid laneway behind the pale-yellow brick medical centre where the authorities keep their computerized records. So many corpses are being brought to the mortuary that human remains are stacked on top of each other. Unidentified bodies must be buried within days for lack of space - but the municipality is so overwhelmed by the number of killings that it can no longer provide the vehicles and personnel to take the remains to cemeteries.
Source: Znet Blog
by Noam Chomsky
August 8, 2005
It’s correct that the Lancet study, by far the most authoritative available, deliberately excluded Fallujah, because that would have raised the estimates much higher—recall that as in all scientific inquiries in related areas (technically, anywhere), this one is based on extrapolation from samples, and they wanted to err on the side of conservatism. For the same reason, they included Kurdish regions where there was very little conflict, thereby reducing the estimates.
Source: OneWorld US
by Abid Aslam
July 29, 2005
WASHINGTON, D.C., Jul 28 (OneWorld) - At least 24,865 Iraqi civilians have died since the U.S.-led coalition began its war in their country but the real figure is unknown because coalition forces, flouting the Geneva Conventions, refuse to aid an accurate count, said a leading medical journal.
"The adamant refusal of the U.S.A. and its partner countries to keep count of Iraqi deaths is a stance that renders farcical the Geneva Conventions' principle that invading forces have a duty to make every effort to protect civilian lives," said an editorial in this week's issue of The Lancet, released late Thursday. "How can the coalition attest that it respects this obligation if it refuses to collect data to prove it?"
Source: Agence France-Presse
July 19, 2005
LONDON, July 19 (AFP) - Almost 25,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed since US and British troops invaded the country two years ago, an average of 34 every single day, a British study said on Tuesday.
More of the deaths overall have been caused by the actions of foreign troops than insurgents within the country, the study by Iraq Body Count and the Oxford Research Group said. However, the report stresses that the vast majority of civilian deaths caused by US and British troops took place in the weeks following the start of war in March 2003, while currently far more deaths occur due to insurgency.
Source: The Age
by Irwin Arieff
July 13, 2005
Nearly 40,000 Iraqis have been killed as a direct result of combat or armed violence since the US-led invasion. It is a figure considerably higher than previous estimates, a Swiss institute reported yesterday.
The public database Iraqi Body Count, by comparison, estimates that between 22,787 and 25,814 Iraqi civilians have died since the March 2003 invasion, based on reports from at least two media sources.
No official estimates of Iraqi casualties from the war have been issued, although military deaths in the US-led coalition forces are closely tracked and now total 1937.
Source: United Press International
July 12, 2005
An Iraqi humanitarian organization is reporting that 128,000 Iraqis have been killed since the U.S. invasion began in March 2003.
Mafkarat al-Islam reported that chairman of the 'Iraqiyun humanitarian organization in Baghdad, Dr. Hatim al-'Alwani, said that the toll includes everyone who has been killed since that time, adding that 55 percent of those killed have been women and children aged 12 and under.
'Iraqiyun obtained data from relatives and families of the deceased, as well as from Iraqi hospitals in all the country's provinces. The 128,000 figure only includes those whose relatives have been informed of their deaths and does not include those were abducted, assassinated or simply disappeared.
The number includes those who died during the U.S. assaults on al-Fallujah and al-Qa'im. 'Iraqiyun's figures conflict with the Iraqi Body Count public database compiled by Geneva-based Graduate Institute of International Studies. According to the Graduate Institute of International Studies' database, 39,000 Iraqis have been killed as a direct result of combat or armed violence since March 2003. No official estimates of Iraqi casualties from the war have been issued by the Pentagon, which insists that it does not do "body counts." The Washington Post on July 12 reported that U.S. military deaths in Iraq now total 1,755.
Source: AlterNet
by Marla Ruzicka
April 18, 2005
Just before her death, Marla Ruzicka wrote about the importance of recording and publicly releasing Iraqi civilian casualty numbers.
BAGHDAD --The writer, a 28-year-old humanitarian aid worker from California, was killed Saturday in Baghdad when a suicide bomber aiming for a convoy of contractors pulled alongside her vehicle and detonated his explosives. Her longtime driver and translator, Faiz Ali Salim, also died. She filed this piece from Baghdad a week before her death.
In my two years in Iraq, the one question I am asked the most is: "How many Iraqi civilians have been killed by American forces?" The American public has a right to know how many Iraqis have lost their lives since the start of the war and as hostilities continue.
Source: Reuters
by Luke Baker
April 5, 2005
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Guerrillas and criminal gangs have killed 6,000 Iraqi civilians over the past two years and wounded 16,000, according to the first comprehensive government estimate of the toll from the insurgency.
"These people in the insurgency are involved in looting, terrorism, killing, kidnapping, drug dealing, beheading and all that," Human Rights Minister Bakhtiar Amin told Reuters on Tuesday.
"There are around 6,000 Iraqis who have been killed by these people and 16,000 who have been wounded," he said, citing figures compiled from records kept by the health, human rights, interior and other ministries.
