The Economist, 30 October 2003
How many Iraqis were killed in the war?
GEORGE BUSH'S declaration of the end of “major combat operations” on May 1st seems less apt with every fresh killing in Iraq. The human cost of the conflict is still rising on all sides—but the overall price paid by the Iraqis is hard to measure.
Counting enemy fatalities in war is tricky: estimates made immediately after the Gulf war in 1991, for example, turned out to be inflated. Eyewitness accounts can exaggerate death tolls. For the 2003 war, the fact that some Iraqi units were bombed much more heavily than others makes extrapolations unreliable, and the large number of deserters complicates the calculations. Iraqi guerrilla tactics made it especially tough to sort genuine civilian casualties from military ones. The Americans say they kept no tally of their own.
But as a recent report by an American think-tank, the Project on Defence Alternatives, points out, it is still worth trying to measure the terrible cost in lives. The report relies on surveys of hospital, burial-society and funeral records by journalists and charities, news reports, and the testimonies of soldiers and other witnesses. There is still some guesswork—for instance, for the number of unrecorded burials, victims entombed in collapsed buildings, and Iraqi troops killed by coalition bombs. But the report makes allowances for overlap between its sources and is strict in its definition of non-combatants.
It reckons that, from the start of the invasion to the fall of Baghdad, between 10,800 and 15,100 Iraqis were killed, of whom some 3,200-4,300 were non-combatants, a higher proportion (and a bigger toll) in the recent war than in the earlier one.
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Citation: The Economist, 30 October 2003
Original URL: http://www.economist.com/world/africa/displaystory.cfm?story_id=E1_NTRDPNN
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