Articles with the Tag Iraqi war deaths

Over one million Iraqis killed, still

Iraqi war deaths
Published on

Back in September, British opinion pollsters ORB released a study showing over a million Iraqis had died in the war and occupation. Now they’ve released a follow-up study, which focussed on rural communities rather than urban areas like the previous one and guess what? the results confirm their earlier study:

Further survey work undertaken by ORB, in association with its research partner IIACSS, confirms our earlier estimate that over 1,000,000 Iraqi citizens have died as a result of the conflict which started in 2003.

Following responses to ORB’s earlier work, which was based on survey work undertaken in primarily urban locations, we have conducted almost 600 additional interviews in rural communities. By and large the results are in line with the ‘urban results’ and we now estimate that the death toll between March 2003 and August 2007 is likely to have been of the order of 1,033,000. If one takes into account the margin of error associated with survey data of this nature then the estimated range is between 946,000 and 1,120,000.

All of this is largely in line with the two Lancet studies, as well as the Iraqi Family Health Study (See Deltoid for more information). No doubt it will be hotly denied by the true believers, but the evidence is overwhelming that the invasion of Iraq continues to be a crime of gargantuan propertions. The solution remains the sme: troops out of Iraq.

Meanwhile, I would like to see similar surveys for Afghanistan, which isn’t looking good either.

Over one million Iraqi deaths

Iraqi war deaths
Published on

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.

Iraqi War deaths: not the Coalition’s responsibility

Iraqi war deaths
Published on

That’s the latest meme in the “deny the undenyable” sweepstakes, the attempts to wish away the Lancet report. I first came across it yesterday, in the comments to this post over at Charlie’s, when Charlie brought up the simple fact that because the occupiers refuse to keep records, the Lancet studies are the best estimates we have of Iraqi deaths. Several people responded to this with variations on ‘the “occupation” ended a couple of years ago’, as if the tens of thousands of foreign troops waging war on the Iraqi population is somehow magicked away by some sort of meaningless handover ceremony. Clue: the US and UK forces are not under Iraqi command.

You have to wonder about the mindset of people who are able to ignore 600,000 deaths by arguing that well, the Coalition wasn’t in control so that makes it all right…

Media reaction to the Lancet report

Iraqi war deaths
Published on

First things first: the report is now online (PDF file). I still need to read it properly, but in the meantime I’d like to talk about the likely media reaction to the report. Already in the LA Times article I linked to below you could see the narrative about the report taking shape, which was confirmed for me by the BBC news report on it during PM.

What is stressed in both cases is 1) how controversial the previous Lancet report was, 2) how out of line the new report is with other and/or official counts (with specific emphasis on Bush’s own estimate of 30,000 deaths earlier this year and the Iraqi Bodycount Project) and 3) the official rejections of the report. What is not reported is that the scientific accuracy of the previous report was never in question, other than by political hacks (See Tim Lambert’s sterling debunking work for more details), nor is explained how the differences in methology between the Lancet report and the Iraqi Bodycount Project makes them incomparable. The latter after all only counts deaths reported in western media and hence misses the vast majority of Iraqi deaths.

This approach is not that surprising: it’s safe ‘n easy, lazy journalism, biased towards the status quo. While Americans may think the BBC is largely immune to the inane habit of “balanced reporting” where the opinion of both sides in an argument is given equal weight, no matter where the truth lies their own newsmedia is infected with, reports like this sadly show this is not the case. Even the BBC is biased towards the status quo and not much interested in investigating the truth. There’s no calculated malice behind this, just the everyday pressures of being a news organisation, one of which is getting the news out now rather than after careful investigation. Later perhaps the claims of both parties can be examined for truth, but by then the newscycle might have already moved on and in any case the false claims are well established.

(This Lenin’s Tomb post has more evidence of the increassing laziness of the BBC’s news teams, in their answer as to why they didn’t pay any attention to the BNP terrorism case.)

Iraq: over 600,000 excess deaths since war began

Iraqi war deaths
Published on

This according to a new study to be published in The Lancet this week, by the same team who did the much maligned 2004 study also published there, which was the first scientific study to the effects of the War on Iraq. The news this time is much worse:

WASHINGTON — More than 600,000 Iraqis have died violently since the U.S.-led invasion, according to a new estimate that is far higher than any other to date.

The report, by a team of researchers criticized for its death estimates two years ago, says that 601,027 Iraqis have suffered violent deaths since the March 2003 invasion. It also suggests that the country has become more violent in the last year.

“This clearly is a much higher number than many people have been thinking about,” said Gilbert Burnham, the report’s lead author and a professor at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University. “It shows the violence has spread across the country.”

Iraq’s violent death rate rose from 3.2 deaths per 1,000 people in the year after the invasion to 12 per 1,000 from June 2005 to June 2006, according to the researchers, whose findings are being published this week in the British medical journal Lancet.

The article tries its best to throw mud on the study, dragging in all kinds of irrelevancies like the Iraqi Bodycount Project, all of which is still familiar from the 2004 study and all of which fails to conceal the magnitude of this disaster. It’s so much more than expected that I don’t know what to say about it, only to note that none of this was necessary.