July 10, 2003	Thursday	Jumadi-ul-Awwal 9,1424

LONDON, July 9: New information from remote locations of Iraq has pushed up the civilian death toll from the US-led war by 500 in the last month to at least 6,000, an Anglo-American research group said on Wednesday.

The Iraq Body Count’s (IBC) latest figures, based on media reports and more than a dozen counting projects from independent investigators in and outside Iraq, put the minimum number of civilians dead at 6,055 and the maximum at 7,706.

“Both the US and the UK said they were taking every effort to minimize civilian casualties and talked a lot about smart, precision weapons,” IBC researcher John Sloboda told Reuters.

“From that, one could have expected a clean war with very few casualties, but I don’t call 5,000 to 7,000 very few. It is clear the coalition claims were political claptrap.”

The latest IBC toll has risen by about 500 after information arrived from areas that had not been reached before by outsiders. The group says its statistics are the most comprehensive collation of civilian deaths available.—Reuters