War in Iraq has killed over 100.000 Iraqis
Last Updated Fri, 29 Oct 2004 06:29:19 EDT
LONDON - Nearly 100,000 more Iraqis have died during the American-led occupation than would have been expected otherwise, a study posted on The Lancet medical journal's website Thursday estimates.
Most of the extra deaths in the first 18 months of the occupation were due to violence, the researchers said – in particular, air strikes that claimed civilian casualties.
"Most individuals reportedly killed by coalition forces were women and children," they wrote.
Previous estimates of the number of Iraqis killed during the American-led air strikes and occupation have ranged from 10,000 to 30,000.
The report in the British journal is based on the work of teams from Johns Hopkins University, Columbia University and the Al-Mustansiriya University in Baghdad. The authors acknowledge that the data cited in the study might be of "limited precision."
However, similar methodology was used in the late 1990s to calculate the number of deaths from the war in Kosovo, put at 10,000.
The information was obtained as Iraqi interviewers surveyed 808 families, consisting of 7,868 people, in 33 different "clusters" or neighbourhoods spread across the country.
In each case, they asked how many births and deaths there had been in the home since January 2002.
That information was then compared with the death rates in each neighbourhood in the 15 months before the invasion that toppled president Saddam Hussein, adjusted for the different time frames, and extrapolated to cover the entire 24.4 million population of Iraq.
The researchers came up with the figure of 100,000 extra deaths based on the fact that the rate rose from five deaths per 1,000 people before the war to 12.3 deaths per 1,000 in the 18 months that followed its start.
Fallujah neighbourhood factored out
One neighbourhood in the besieged city of Fallujah may have boosted the numbers unnaturally, the researchers pointed out.
But even with that neighbourhood taken out, the death rate was 7.9 per 1,000 people – 50 per cent higher during the occupation than in the months before.
"We estimate that there were 98,000 extra deaths during the post-war period in the 97 per cent of Iraq represented by all the clusters except Fallujah," the researchers said in the journal.
Nearly 1,100 American soldiers have also died in the conflict.
Before the invasion, the most common causes of death in Iraq were heart attacks, strokes and other chronic diseases, the Lancet report said.
Since early 2002, violence was by far the main cause of death, linked to coalition air strikes in about 95 per cent of cases where people died by the intentional act of others. Infant mortality also rose significantly.
Written by CBC News Online staff
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time to get out now yankees
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