13 October 2006
U.S. Questions High Estimate of Iraq Civilian Casualties
Pentagon says 50,000 Iraqis -- not half a million -- have died since March 2003
Washington -- U.S. authorities and some outside observers have voiced strong doubts about the accuracy of a new independent study that suggests the Iraqi death toll is roughly half a million, although they admit that tens of thousands of people have been killed in Iraq since U.S.-led forces overthrew the government of Saddam Hussein in 2003.
The U.S. government does not officially track the number of Iraqi deaths. Until recently, current independent estimates of violence-related deaths in Iraq have ranged from 40,000 to more than 100,000. For example, the Iraq Body Count Project, a nonprofit group, analyzes worldwide media reports in multiple languages and estimates between 43,000 and 48,700 Iraqis have died as of the end of this week.
An independent Iraqi nongovernmental organization, Iraqiyun, has estimated more than 120,000 deaths from the time of the invasion to July 2005. The independent Web site Iraq Coalition Casualty Count began tabulating news reports of civilian deaths in March 2005. The site acknowledges that its civilian casualty numbers are not authoritative but estimates that 18,000 civilians and more than 4,200 Iraqi police have been killed since the beginning of 2005.
Against this backdrop, the British medical journal Lancet reported October 11 that an independent academic study, using a statistical sampling method, estimated approximately 650,000 Iraqis have died as a consequence of war since March 2003. The study was led by the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health working with the Al Mustansiriya University in Baghdad, Iraq. However, the study’s authors acknowledge that their number is the midpoint in an estimate that ranges between 390,000 and 940,000.
“That 650,000 number seems way, way beyond any number that I have seen,” U.S. General George Casey, commander of multinational forces in Iraq, told Pentagon reporters October 11. “I've not seen a number higher than 50,000. And so I don't give that much credibility at all.”
Casey said he could not recall if his estimate of 50,000 was from the U.S. government or from the Iraqi government.
President Bush in December 2005 became the first U.S. official to publicly discuss the number of Iraqi war deaths. Answering a reporter’s question, Bush replied, “How many Iraqi citizens have died in this war? I would say 30,000, more or less, have died as a result of the initial incursion and the ongoing violence against Iraqis.” White House aides said Bush was citing public estimates. At the time, the Iraq Body Count Project estimated 27,000 to 31,000 Iraqis had died. Since then, Iraq has faced escalating violence and civilian death rates that, according to news reports, have sometimes reached 1,000 per month.
“I stand by that figure,” Bush told reporters October 11, when asked about his estimate of 30,000 Iraqi deaths as of December 2005. He added the numbers in the newly released study don’t match any statistics he has seen.
“No, I don’t consider it a credible report,” Bush said. “Neither does General Casey, and neither do Iraqi officials. I do know that a lot of innocent people have died, and that troubles me, and it grieves me.” (See related article.)
Anthony Cordesman, an independent analyst who has been critical of the handling of the U.S. mission in Iraq, said the study published in the Lancet implies that at least 5 percent of the Iraqi population has been killed and wounded -- the majority in the past two years. Cordesman says the level of violence is certainly high in Iraq, but there seems to be no evidence to support a claim that 1 million people – one in every 20 -- have been killed or badly injured.
“Nobody else has seen those results on the ground,” Cordesman said October 12 during an interview on the influential public radio the Diane Rehm Show.”
Cordesman questioned the timing of the study’s release so close to an important U.S. congressional election. He noted that a previous study by the same Johns Hopkins researchers – estimating 100,000 Iraqi civilian deaths through late 2004 – was published by the Lancet in late October 2004, just days before President Bush’s reelection.
“The timing of this is not the kind of timing I expect from a reputable research effort,” said Cordesman, a former military intelligence analyst who now works as a researcher at the bipartisan Center for Strategic and International Studies. He has traveled to Iraq several times to report on U.S. military operations.
“The timing is remarkably coincidental” with the U.S. elections, Cordesman said. He noted that civilian deaths are extremely difficult to measure during ongoing conflicts. “The truth is, historically, we have very bad data from wars.”
For example, there are no reliable figures for the numbers of Iraqis killed by Saddam Hussein’s oppressive regime, even though civilian deaths are believed to have numbered well into the hundreds of thousands. Nor are there reliable figures for the numbers of Iraqis who died as a result of the former regime’s refusal to buy food and medicine with the proceeds from the United Nations Oil-for-Food Program.
The Johns Hopkins data, based mainly on sample interviews with Iraqi households, do not distinguish deaths of noncombatants from those involved in sectarian violence or attacks against Iraqi and coalition forces. For example, 91 percent of the violent deaths in the study were men. Of those, about 75 percent were males aged 15 to 44. About 56 percent of deaths were caused by gunshots and 27 percent by car bombs or other explosions.
By comparison, in World War II, the overall death rate was 3.3 percent of the population of countries involved in the conflict (other than the United States). However, some countries, for example Germany, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and the Soviet Union, experienced casualties in excess of 10 percent of their total populations.
More recently, the 1992-1995 war in Bosnia and Herzegovina is considered Europe’s deadliest since World War II. From 1995 to 2005, the death toll was widely cited in government and media reports as ranging from 200,000 to 300,000 – roughly 4 to 7 percent of the prewar population. However, in December 2005, the BiH Research and Documentation Center announced it had identified 94,000 people – civilians and soldiers – who lost their lives in the war. The center said the overall total was probably about 100,000 -- roughly 2.5 percent of the population.
As of mid-October, more than 2,700 U.S. troops have died in Iraq. More than 230 members of other international forces have also given their lives in Iraq.
See also “U.S., Iraqi Officials Dispute Casualty Estimate.”
For additional information, see Iraq Update.
(The Washington File is a product of the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)
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