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 excess 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 has been “prosecuted in the most precise fashion of any conflict in the history of modern warfare” and that “the loss of any innocent lives is a tragedy, something that Iraqi security forces and the multi-national 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 over-counting,” 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.
“We are quite confident that there’s been somewhere in the neighborhood of 100,000 deaths, but it could be much higher,” Roberts said.
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