BAGHDAD, 11 January 2008 — One of the biggest surveys so far of Iraqis who have met violent deaths since the US-led invasion of 2003 has put the figure at about 151,000.
The estimate comes from projections by the World Health Organization and the Iraqi government, based on door-to-door surveys of nearly 10,000 households.
Experts called it the most scientific study of the Iraqi death toll since the war began. But its bottom line is far lower than the 600,000 deaths reported in an earlier study published by Lancet journal.
The new estimate covers a period from the start of the war in March 2003 through June 2006. It closely mirrors the tally Iraq’s health minister gave in late 2006, based on 100 bodies a day arriving at morgues and hospitals. His number shocked people in and outside Iraq, because it was so much higher than previously accepted estimates. Despite the large number of families interviewed for the WHO survey, the authors do not say 151,000 is a precise figure. Instead, they offer a range of between 104,000 and 223,000.
“Assessment of the death toll in conflict situations is extremely difficult and household survey results have to be interpreted with caution,” said study co-author Mohamed Ali, a WHO statistician. “However, in the absence of comprehensive death registration and hospital reporting, household surveys are the best we can do.”
While the US military says it does not track Iraqi deaths, it has challenged some news reports of tolls from shootings and bombings as exaggerated — indicating it does in fact monitor fatalities.
The true toll may never be known because many deaths go unreported in the chaos that has gripped the country. Dr. Salih Mahdi Motlab Al-Hasnawi, the Iraqi health minister, defended the new estimate in a telephone interview with reporters yesterday. “This is a very sound survey with a large sample and good methods,” he said.
Richard Brennan of the New York-based International Rescue Committee, which has done similar research in Kosovo, Uganda and Congo, agreed. “The goal is not to give an absolute, precise number of deaths. The goal is to give a sense of the magnitude of the problem,” he said.
The World Health Organization paid more than $1.6 million for the new study. Results were posted online by the New England Journal of Medicine on Wednesday.
By any count, the toll is massive, wrote Catherine and John Brownstein, statistics experts at Yale University and Harvard Medical School, respectively, in an accompanying essay. It likely still is low, because many Iraqis have fled and aren’t there to report deaths and because Iraq is too dangerous to survey some areas.
Researchers asked families whether any deaths had occurred in their households, recorded details like age and time and place of death, and assigned deaths as violence-related or not.
However, road accidents were not counted unless they were caused by a bomb — one of many ways that surveyors could have underestimated the true toll, some experts said.
More than 100 neighborhoods, mostly in Baghdad and Anbar, could not be visited for safety reasons. So researchers estimated deaths in those areas by using a formula based on information from another group that tallies fatalities, the British-based Iraq Body Count.
The Body Count project bases its figures mostly on media reports — a method known to underestimate deaths because many go unreported. That group listed 47,668 civilian deaths from violence during the period studied in the WHO survey, and between 80,331 and 87,742 to date since the war began.
The group’s numbers do not include deaths of fighters, but the WHO survey and an earlier one published in the journal Lancet in 2006 do. The Lancet study, by Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and the Al-Mustansiriya University in Baghdad, surveyed 1,849 households and concluded that 600,000 Iraqis had died from violence, mostly gunfire, and roughly 50,000 more from other causes like heart disease and cancer.
The WHO survey tallied only violence-related deaths, but researchers plan future reports on other health measures.
