NEW YORK, Oct 11: Over 600,000 civilians have died in violence in Iraq since its US invasion in 2003, according to a team of American and Iraqi public health researchers, reported the New York Times on Wednesday.
This is the highest estimate ever for the toll of the war in Iraq. The figure breaks down to about 15,000 violent deaths a month, a number that is quadruple to the one for July given by Iraqi government hospitals and the morgue in Baghdad and published last month in a United Nations report in Iraq. That month was the highest for Iraqi civilian deaths since the invasion, the newspaper noted.
But it is an estimate and not a precise count and researchers acknowledged a margin of error that ranged from 426,369 to 793,663 deaths.
The Times said that it is the second study by researchers from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. It uses samples of casualties from Iraqi households to extrapolate an overall figure of 601,027 Iraqis dead from violence between March 2,003 and July 2,006.
The findings of the previous study, published in The Lancet, a British medical journal, in 2004, had been criticized as high, in part because of its relatively narrow sampling of about 1,000 families, and because it carried a large margin of error.
The newspaper quoted researchers as saying the new study was more representative and the sampling broader: it surveyed 1,849 Iraqi families in 47 different areas across Iraq. The selection of geographical areas in 18 regions across Iraq was based on population size, not on the level of violence, they said.
The study comes at a sensitive time for the Iraqi government, which is under pressure from American officials to take action against militias driving sectarian killings.
In the last week of September, the government barred the central morgue in Baghdad and the health ministry — the two main sources of information for civilian deaths — from releasing figures to the media.
Now, only the government is to release figures. It has not provided statistics for September, though a spokesman said on Tuesday that it would.
The American military has disputed the figures, saying that they are far higher than the actual number of deaths from the insurgency and sectarian violence, in part because they include natural deaths and deaths from ordinary crime, like domestic violence.
But the military has not released figures of its own, giving only percentage comparisons. For example, it cited a 46 per cent drop in murder rate in Baghdad in August from July as evidence of the success of its recent sweeps.
At a briefing on Monday, the military spokesman declined to characterize the change for September.
US President George Bush dismissed the report as ‘not credible.’
President Bush, who in the past has suggested 30,000 civilian deaths in Iraq, would not give a figure for overall fatalities. “I do know that a lot of innocent people have died,” he said.
