IRAQ:A new survey that suggests 151,000 Iraqis died in the first three years of the war is far from a definitive tally, writes Michael Jansen
The World Health Organisation survey of post-invasion Iraqi fatalities has perpetuated and deepened rather than resolved the controversy over violent deaths in that country.
The WHO study, released this week by the New England Journal of Medicine, estimates that 151,000 Iraqis died violently following the US-led invasion in March 2003 through June 2006. The figure is 17 times greater than the level of violent deaths before the invasion, says the WHO.
The study holds that an average of 128 Iraqis died violently each day during the first year following the US-led invasion, 115 during the second and 126 during the third.
More than half these fatalities took place in Baghdad. Men aged between 15 and 59 accounted for 83 per cent of fatalities, while 10 per cent of the victims were children under 15.
Although higher than some earlier figures, the new estimate is problematic.
Extrapolated from statistics based on interviews with 9,345 Iraqi households, the figure is not precise and could range from 104,000-223,000 deaths in a population of 26 million.
There are serious reasons why some analysts argue these figures could be low. Survey teams admitted they were unable to visit 11 per cent of the areas targeted because of unrest and said the mass flight of Iraqi families from their homes could lead to under-reporting.
The survey's results may also have been skewed by WHO's reliance on field work carried out by the Iraqi health ministry, which has at times revealed and then suppressed fatality figures due to pressure from the occupation authorities. Health ministry personnel drawn from the faction of radical Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr are widely feared by Sunnis, Christians, and members of other communities because Sadrist militiamen have been responsible for much of the killing and ethnic cleansing which have transformed Baghdad from being a 65 per cent Sunni to 75 per cent Shia city.
Many respondents are likely to have concealed rather than revealed deaths in their families. Furthermore, the survey does not cover the entire period when sectarian killings surged after the bombing of a sacred Shia shrine in February 2006.
The WHO finding is unwelcome to the Iraqi government and the Bush administration because it is five times higher than the figure of "30,000, more or less" given by George W Bush in December 2005, six months short of the cut-off date of the survey. The WHO figure is also three times greater than the estimate of 50,000 put forward by the Iraqi health ministry and the toll of 47,668 produced by Iraq Body Count for the same period. Iraq Body Count, a British organisation, admits that its figures, based on reports in Iraqi media, are low because many, perhaps even most, death notices are not published in the media.
Another factor contributing to poor accounting is that many corpses are not taken to hospitals or morgues and are buried on the day of or the day or day after death, in accordance with Muslim practice. The 151,000 WHO average is one-quarter of the 601,027 violent deaths reported by researchers from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore whose results were published in October 2006. The Johns Hopkins study was based on projections from interviews of 1,849 families, each with an average of seven members.
An even higher estimate of deaths was released in September 2007 by Britain's ORB (Opinion Research Business) polling firm, which consulted 1,461 adults. The poll suggested that the total number of excess violent deaths was 1,164,650, or 1.2 million.
However controversial and inconclusive, the 39-month WHO figure gives a much higher rate of violent deaths than the 20-year total of 250,000-290,000 of murders attributed by Human Rights Watch to the ousted regime of Saddam Hussein.
Regime opponents put the overall figure at 300,000-350,000 for the period of Baathist rule from 1968-2003, excluding Iraqi soldiers killed during the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-88 and the US-led campaigns of 1991 and 2003.
University of Michigan Professor Juan Cole, a leading expert on post-war Iraq, makes the point that excavations of mass graves since the war have not borne out these figures.