100,000 civilian Iraqi deaths since war by Reuters, Times Online 7:52am 29th Oct, 2004   October 29, 2004.    Iraqi civilian deaths put at 100,000. (Reuters)    Tens of thousands of Iraqis have been killed in violence since the US-led invasion last year, according to public health experts who estimate there were 100,000 "excess deaths" in 18 months.    The US-based researchers found that the risk of death from violence in the period after the invasion was 58 times higher than before the war.    The rise in the death rate was mainly due to violence and much of it was caused by US air strikes on towns and cities, they said.    "Making conservative assumptions, we think that about 100,000 excess deaths or more have happened since the 2003 invasion of Iraq," said Les Roberts of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in a report published online by The Lancet medical journal.    "The use of air power in areas with lots of civilians appears to be killing a lot of women and children," Mr Roberts said.    The report comes just days before the US presidential election in which the Iraq war has been a major issue. Mortality was already high in Iraq before the war because of United Nations sanctions blocking food and medical imports. But the researchers described their findings after the war as shocking.    Air strikes    The new figures are based on surveys done by the researchers in Iraq in September 2004. They compared Iraqi deaths during 14.6 months before the invasion in March 2003 and the 17.8 months after it by conducting household surveys in randomly selected neighbourhoods.    Previous estimates based on think-tank and media sources put the Iraqi civilian death toll at up to 16,053 and military fatalities as high as 6,370.    By comparison, about 849 US military personnel were killed in combat or attacks and another 258 died in accidents or incidents not related to fighting, according to the Pentagon.    The researchers blamed air strikes for many of the civilian deaths."What we have evidence of is the use of air power in populated urban areas and the bad consequences of it," Roberts said. Gilbert Burnham, who collaborated on the research, says US military action in Iraq was "very bad for Iraqi civilians".    "We were not expecting the level of deaths from violence that we found in this study and we hope this will lead to some serious discussions of how military and political aims can be achieved in a way that is not so detrimental to civilians populations," he told Reuters.    The researchers did 33 cluster surveys of 30 households each, recording the date, circumstances and cause of deaths. Before the war the major causes of death were heart attacks, chronic disorders and accidents. That changed after the war.    Two-thirds of violent deaths in the study were reported in Fallujah, the insurgent held city 50 kilometres west of Baghdad which has been repeatedly hit by US air strikes.    "Our results need further verification and should lead to changes to reduce non-combatant deaths from air strikes," Mr Roberts added in the study.    Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet, said the research which was submitted to the journal this month had been peer-reviewed, edited and fast-tracked for publication because of its importance in the evolving security situation in Iraq.    "But these findings also raise questions for those far removed from Iraq - in the governments of the countries responsible for launching a pre-emptive war," Mr Horton said in an editorial.    October 28, 2004    "Death toll of Iraqi civilians tops 100,000, study says", by Jenny Booth, Times Online.    At least 100,000 Iraqi civilians have died as a result of the allied invasion of Iraq in March last year, according to a study by public health experts published today.    The risk of dying prematurely has risen by 250 per cent for ordinary Iraqi people since Saddam Hussein was toppled, the US and Iraqi scientists estimate, while the risk of dying violently is 58 times higher.    Most of the victims of violence are women and children killed by allied airstrikes, said the online report in the Lancet medical journal. It called for changes in coalition military tactics to cut the death toll.    The study found that the most lethal area of the country was around the city of Fallujah, where two thirds of the violent deaths were estimated to have occurred. American troops besieged Fallujah for six weeks in April, and have continued to bombard the city from the air, saying it is the base of the Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.    The US Army is expected to launch another attack on Fallujah after the US election. British troops from the Black Watch are currently deploying south of Baghdad to free US marines for another assault on the city, which has been encircled for two weeks.    When the violent civilian deaths in Fallujah were taken out of the equation, the risk of dying had risen by 150 per cent in Iraq as a whole, the academics found.    Before the invasion, the major causes of death in Iraq were heart attack, stroke and chronic illness.    A team of American and Iraqi researchers carried out the study last month by surveying clusters of households. They compared civilian mortality during the 14.6 months before the invasion with the 17.8 month period after it.    The researchers, led by Dr Les Roberts from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, conducted interviews with 988 households from 33 randomly selected neighbourhoods, recording the place and manner of each violent death reported.    Dr Roberts said: "Making conservative assumptions, we think that about 100,000 excess deaths or more have happened since the 2003 invasion of Iraq.    "Violence accounted for most of the excess deaths, and air strikes from coalition forces accounted for most violent deaths. We have shown that the collection of public health information is possible even during periods of extreme violence.    "Our results need further verification and should lead to changes to reduce non-combatant deaths from air strikes."    The estimated 100,000 civilian deaths compare with 1,110 American troop casualties and 140 non-American military casualties in Iraq, around 70 of them British, since the war began last March.
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