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WORLD / Middle East
Iraq war has cost 1.2m lives - Survey
(The Observer)
Updated: 2007-09-17 07:37
A startling new household survey of Iraqis released last week claims as
many as 1.2 million people may have died because of the conflict in Iraq
- apparently lending weight to a 2006 survey in the Lancet that reported
similarly high levels.
More than one million deaths were already being suggested by anti-war
campaigners, but such high counts have consistently been rejected by US
and UK officials. The estimates, extrapolated from a sample of 1,461
adults around the country, were collected by a British polling agency,
ORB, which asked Iraqis how many people living in their household had
died as a result of the violence.
Previous estimates, most prominently collected by the Johns Hopkins
Bloomberg School of Public Health, reported in the Lancet in October
2006, suggested almost half this number, 654,965, as a likely figure in a
possible range of 390,000 to 940,000.
Although the household survey was carried out by a polling organization,
rather than by epidemiological researchers operating under the discipline
of scientific peer review, it has again raised the specter that the 2003
invasion of Iraq has caused a far more substantial death toll than
officially acknowledged by the US or UK governments or the Iraqi Ministry
of Health.
The ORB survey follows an earlier report by the organization which
suggested one in four Iraqi adults had had a family member killed. Their
latest survey suggests that in Baghdad that number is as high as one in
two. The poll also questioned the surviving relatives on how their loved
ones were killed. It reveals 48 per cent died from a gunshot wound, 20
per cent from the impact of a car bomb, 9 per cent from aerial
bombardment, 6 per cent by accident and 6 per cent from another blast or
ordnance.
If true, the latest figures would suggest the death toll in Iraq now
exceeds that of the Rwandan genocide in which 800,000 died.
The new effort to estimate the number of dead in Iraq is certain to
reignite the controversy over the lack of any proper accounting of the
number of civilian dead in Iraq.
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