By Neil King, Jr.
The Wall Street Journal, 11 October 2006
WASHINGTON -- A new study asserts that roughly 600,000 Iraqis have died from violence since the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003, a figure many times higher than any previous estimate.
The study, to be published Saturday in the British medical journal the Lancet, was conducted by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health by sending teams of Iraqi doctors across Iraq from May through July. The findings are sure to draw fire from skeptics and could color the debate over the war ahead of congressional elections next month.
The Defense Department until 2004 eschewed any effort to compute the number of Iraqi dead but this summer released a study putting the civilian casualty rate between May and August at 117 people a day. Other tabulations using different methodologies put the range of total civilian fatalities so far from about 50,000 to more than 150,000. President Bush in December said "30,000, more or less" had died in Iraq during the invasion and in the violence since.
The Johns Hopkins team conducted its study using a methodology known as "cluster sampling." That involved randomly picking 47 clusters of households for a total 1,849 households, scattered across Iraq. Team members interviewed each household about any deaths in the family during the 40 months since the invasion, as well as in the year before the invasion. The team says it reviewed death certificates for 92% of all deaths reported. Based on those figures, it tabulated national mortality rates for various periods before and after the start of the war. The mortality rate last year was nearly four times the preinvasion rate, the study found.
"Since March 2003, an additional 2.5% of Iraq's population has died above what would have occurred without conflict," the report said. The country's population is roughly 24 million people.
Human Rights Watch has estimated Saddam Hussein's regime killed 250,000 to 290,000 people over 20 years.
The Lancet study, funded largely by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Center for International Studies, said while the percentage of deaths attributed to the U.S.-led coalition has decreased over the past year, coalition forces were involved in 31% of all violent deaths since March 2003. Most of the deaths in Iraq, particularly in the past two years, have been caused by insurgent, terrorist and sectarian violence.
Overall, the study found 55% of deaths since March 2003 were due to violence. Of that subset, 56% resulted from gunshots; car bombs and other explosives accounted for 27%, and airstrikes caused 13%. The rest were due to other factors.
Paul Bolton, a public-health researcher at Boston University who has reviewed the study, called the methodology "excellent" and said it was standard procedure in a wide range of studies he has worked on. "You can't be sure of the exact number, but you can be quite sure that you are in the right ballpark," he said.
A similar, smaller study by the same team in 2004 put the number of deaths at the time at 9,000 to 194,000. That report drew fire for the breadth of its estimate. In part to offset such criticism, the researchers said they picked the largest sample possible for this survey, after considering the high level of danger involved in sending teams door-to-door in Iraq.
The study's lead researchers, Gilbert Burnham and Les Roberts of Johns Hopkins, have done studies in the Congo, Rwanda and other war zones. "This is a standard methodology that the U.S. government and others have encouraged groups to use in developing countries," said Mr. Burnham, who defended the study as "a scientifically extremely strong paper."
This study, "The Human Cost of the War in Iraq," puts civilian fatalities at 426,369 to 793,663 but gives a 95% certainty to the figure of 601,027.
Hamit Dardagan, co-founder of Iraq Body Count, a London-based human-rights group, called the Lancet study's figures "pretty shockingly high." His group tabulates the civilian death toll based on media reports augmented by local hospital and morgue records. His group says it has accumulated reports of as many as 48,693 civilian deaths caused by the U.S. intervention.
Mr. Burnham said the disparity between his survey and tabulations like Iraq Body Count are largely because of the heavy media and government focus on Baghdad and a few other cities. "What our data show is that the level of violence is going on throughout the country," he said.
Lt. Col. Mark Ballesteros, a Defense Department spokesman, said the Pentagon doesn't comment on reports that haven't been publicly released. Nonetheless, he said, "the coalition takes enormous precautions to prevent civilian deaths and injuries," adding that "the Iraqi ministry of health would be in a better position, with all of its records, to provide more accurate information on deaths in Iraq."
Since 2004, the Pentagon has collected data on civilian deaths in incidents where coalition forces were involved. According to its August civilian-casualty report, those figures show that the daily civilian death rate has increased nearly sixfold, to almost 120 this summer from about 20 in early 2004. The Lancet study cites the Pentagon's numbers to back its own findings, saying the mortality-rate increases in both tabulations closely parallel one another.
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Citation: Neil King, Jr. "Iraqi Death Toll Exceeds 600,000, Study Estimates," The Wall Street Journal, 11 October 2006.
Original URL: http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB116052896787288831-8l5AMVpCdg07M3w6XdmTXoPuzno_20061109.html?mod=tff_main_tff_top
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