A new study by public health researchers estimates that up to 600,000 Iraqi people — nearly 1 in 40 — have died violently since the US-led invasion of the country in March 2003.
The estimate, which far exceeds figures compiled by the UN and the Iraqi Government, is the second made by a group of American and Italian researchers and used a sampling of nearly 2,000 households across Iraq to extrapolate a total number of violent deaths, be they caused by crime, the US-led coalition or sectarian strife.
The first report, issued in October 2004 by a team led by Les Roberts of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, estimated that 100,000 people had been killed in the first year of the war. The study was criticised for its narrow sample and wide margin of error.
The new study, published in the online edition of The Lancet, the British medical journal, also accepts a broad range of error, with its lead author, Gilbert Burnham, also of Johns Hopkins, saying the true figure could lie anywhere between 426,369 to 793,663.
It estimated that a total of 654,965 more Iraqis had died as a consequence of the war than "would have been expected in a non-conflict situation". Of those, 601,000 had died directly of violent causes, including gunfire, car bombs, air strikes and other explosions.
The rest had suffered from a general decline in healthcare and sanitary standards due to failing water supplies, sewerage and electricity supply...
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