Articles with the Tag ORB study

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.

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.