so says the new poll put out by the ORB polling agency:
In the week in which General Patraeus reports back to US Congress on the impact the recent ‘surge’ is having in Iraq, a new poll reveals that more than 1,000,000 Iraqi citizens have been murdered since the invasion took place in 2003.
Previous estimates, most noticeably the one published in the Lancet in October 2006, suggested almost half this number (654,965 deaths). These findings come from a poll released today by O.R.B., the British polling agency that have been tracking public opinion in Iraq since 2005. In conjunction with their Iraqi fieldwork agency a representative sample of 1,461 adults aged 18+ answered the following question:-
QHow many members of your household, if any, have died as a result of the conflict in Iraq since 2003 (ie as a result of violence rather than a natural death such as old age)? Please note that I mean those who were actually living under your roof.
None 78%
One 16%
Two 5%
Three 1%
Four or more 0.002%Given that from the 2005 census there are a total of 4,050,597 households this data suggests a total of 1,220,580 deaths since the invasion in 2003.
More data is available on the page linked above. If this poll is accurate, it helps to vindicate the Lancet Report that came out last year and was widely disbelieved. But of course a million deaths now is in line with the over 600,000 found in the Lancet Report last year.
One point I’m wondering about is how the reported one to two million Iraqi refugees influences the figures extrapolated from this poll. After all, the household figures mentioned in the press release are from 2005, while the poll was held only recently; how many of those households are still in Iraq? If there are significantly less households in Iraq, extrapolating the figures found in the poll from the households polled to the total number of households in Iraq in 2005 and deriving a total number of deaths from that, will inflate the total number of deaths found. Of course the people who have fled Iraq were also not polled, so that may also put the number off…
However, the point remains that the total number of Iraqi deaths as a consequence of the 2003 invasion is far greater than is generally accepted by the US and UK governments and the mainstream media, and each further study confirms the findings of the original Lancet reports. It’s these findings that put the lie to the idea that the continuing US/UK presence is benificial.