Iraq, over 600,000 dead, New York Times says

From the New York Times in the USA:

Iraqi Dead May Total 600,000, Study Says

by SABRINA TAVERNISE and DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.

October 11, 2006

BAGHDAD, Oct. 10 — A team of American and Iraqi public health researchers has estimated that 600,000 civilians have died in violence across Iraq since the 2003 American invasion, the highest estimate ever for the toll of the war here.

The figure breaks down to about 15,000 violent deaths a month, a number that is quadruple the one for July given by Iraqi government hospitals and the morgue in Baghdad and published last month in a United Nations report in Iraq.

That month was the highest for Iraqi civilian deaths since the American invasion.

But it is an estimate and not a precise count, and researchers acknowledged a margin of error that ranged from 426,369 to 793,663 deaths.

It is the second study by researchers from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

It uses samples of casualties from Iraqi households to extrapolate an overall figure of 601,027 Iraqis dead from violence between March 2003 and July 2006.

The findings of the previous study, published in The Lancet, a British medical journal, in 2004, had been criticized as high, in part because of its relatively narrow sampling of about 1,000 families, and because it carried a large margin of error.

The new study is more representative, its researchers said, and the sampling is broader: it surveyed 1,849 Iraqi families in 47 different neighborhoods across Iraq.

The selection of geographical areas in 18 regions across Iraq was based on population size, not on the level of violence, they said.

See also here.

And here.

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If Bush supporters want to attack these figures on Iraq: the Bush administration accepted similar statistics published in The Lancet, of numbers of dead people in Darfur, Sudan, as they have a conflict with the government there.

However, their own figures seem to be something different …

How does George W Bush’s record as a killer in Iraq, compare to that of Saddam Hussein?

Bush’s record here, like in torture in Iraq, manages to beat even Saddam Hussein.

Iraq: death of British cameraman Terry Lloyd; see also here; and here.

Correspondence with Iraq Body Count on figures: here.