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Edited on Tue Aug-01-06 04:06 PM by leveymg
The Israeli ratio may be in the same ballpark? I read yesterday the Lebanese Gov't yesterday said that nearly 900 have died. But, one estimate concluded that only 7,000 Iraqi civilians died as a direct result of US military operations during the invasion. If that is accurate, and one accepts that 20,000 Iraqi soldiers died during the invasion, the Israelis seem to have inflicted a much higher civilian casualty rate in Lebanon. Anyone have firm figures for that? I have this range for estimated total Iraqi casualties 30-100K - http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:qR5dPsx2xfEJ:www2.gsb.columbia.edu/faculty/jstiglitz/cost_of_war_in_iraq.pdf+Iraq+war+military/civilian+casualty+ratio&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=1Lancet provides the high estimate. Note that most of those were "excess" post-conflict civilian deaths. Here's the complete section from Wikipedia: Although there are no accurate counts of dead Iraqi soldiers, and U.S. Central Command has made few statements on the subject, U.S. General Tommy Franks reportedly estimated soon after the invasion that there had been 30,000 Iraqi troops killed as of April 9, 2003 <23>. (He later said "we don't do body counts.") Officials did estimate that 2,000-3,000 Iraqi troops were killed in one day alone during a blitz into Baghdad on April 5, 2003, suggesting that a total in the tens of thousands is not unlikely for the entire six-week period of major combat. (Following that period, the Iraqi military was effectively disbanded.)
In late May 2003, one reporter for The Guardian estimated that between 13,500 and 45,000 Iraqi soldiers were killed by American and British troops during six weeks of war <24>.
A later, more frequently quoted study published in October, 2003 estimated that there were between 4,895 and 6,370 Iraqi military deaths <25>. The study explained that to arrive at this number, they had adjusted the underlying incident reports from the field by reducing each count by anywhere from 20% to 60%, based on their own reliability assessments, in order to "control for casualty inflation — a prevalent form of bias." Thus, the actual reports they were summarizing totalled between 6,119 and 15,925 deaths.
Civilian casualties
Iraqi civilians have suffered the bulk of fatalities in this conflict. Estimates of the number of civilian deaths are better documented than the estimates of Iraqi military casualties, but they still reveal significant uncertainty.
One study done by public health experts from Johns Hopkins University and published on 29 October 2004 in the Lancet medical journal, estimated that 100,000 "excess" Iraqi deaths from all causes had occurred since the US invasion began. The study did not attempt to measure how many of these were civilian, but the study's authors have said they believe that the "vast majority" were civilians. To arrive at these excess death figures, a survey was taken from nearly 1000 Iraqi households in 33 clusters throughout Iraq, in which the residents were asked how many people lived there and how many births and deaths there had been since the war began. They then compared the death rate with the average from the 15 months before the war. Iraqis were found to be 1.5 times more likely to die from all causes after the invasion (rising from 0.5% to 0.79% per year) than in the 15 months preceding the war, producing an estimate of 98,000 excess deaths. This figure excluded data from one cluster in Falluja, which was deemed too much of an outlier for inclusion in the national estimate. If including data from Falluja, which showed a higher rate of violent deaths than the other 32 clusters combined, the increase in the death rate would be raised from 1.5 to 2.5, and violent deaths would be 58 times more likely with most of them due to air-strikes by coalition forces. <26>
Another study was commissioned by the United Nations Development Program, called the Iraq Living Conditions Survey, which sampled almost 22,000 households across all Iraqi provinces. It estimated 24,000 war-related violent deaths by May 2004 (with a 95 percent confidence interval from 18,000 to 29,000). This study also did not attempt to measure what portion of its estimate was made up of civilians. It would include Iraqi military killed during the invasion, as well as "insurgents" or other fighters thereafter. <27> <28>
An independent UK/US group, the Iraq Body Count project, compiles reported Iraqi civilian deaths resulting from the invasion and occupation, including those caused directly by coalition military action, those caused directly by the Iraqi insurgency, and those resulting from excess crime (the Iraqi Body Count project claims that the Occupying Authority is responsible to prevent these deaths under international law.) It shows a minimum of 37,918 and a maximum of 42,288 as of May 25, 2006. These figures include individual incident reports as well as hospital and morgue statistics that have been reported by at least two sources in the press. The website released a report detailing the civilian deaths it had recorded between 2003 and 2005. The report says the US and its allies were responsible for the largest share (37%) of the 24,865 deaths. The remaining deaths were attibuted to anti-occupations forces (9%), crime (36%) and unknown agents (11%). <29>
Another study by an Iraqi political party, the "People's Kifah, or Struggle Against Hegemony," reported the findings of a survey it conducted between March and June of 2003 throughout the non-Kurdish areas of Iraq. They tallied 36,533 civilians killed in those areas by June 2003. Information on this study was first published on the website of retired Wall Street Journal reporter Jude Wanniski in August of 2003 <30>. While detailed town-by-town totals are given by the PK spokesperson, details of methodology are very thin and raw data is not in the public domain. A still less detailed report on this study appeared some months later in Al Jazeerah. <31> The Al Jazeera report claims the study covered up to October 2003, but this can not be accurate, as the exact same figures were already published on the Wanniski website in August of 2003.
(Note that both groups above define the word civilian to exclude the various paramilitary forces operating in Iraq as well as the official military forces that existed under Saddam Hussein's regime.)
In June 2006, the Los Angeles Times released a report on death figures compiled by Iraqi officials from the records of the Baghdad Morgue, the Iraqi Health Ministry and other official agencies in Iraq, which concluded that the "War's Iraqi Death Toll Tops 50,000". The report said the count was "mostly of civilians" but also included security forces and insurgents. It added that, "Many more Iraqis are believed to have been killed but not counted because of serious lapses in recording deaths in the chaotic first year after the invasion, when there was no functioning Iraqi government, and continued spotty reporting nationwide since."<32>
As for the major combat phase of the war from March–April 2003, Abu Dhabi TV reported on April 8, 2003 that Iraqi sources had claimed that 1,252 civilians had been killed and 5,103 had been wounded. The Iraq Body Count project, incorporating subsequent reports, has reported that by the end of the major combat phase up to April 30, 2003, 7,299 civilians had been killed, primarily by US air and ground forces. <33>. |
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