39,000 Iraqis Killed in Fighting Since March ‘03

July 16th, 2005 at 14:45 Björn Hallberg

Now that is obviously no way near the 100.000 previously claimed but on the other hand it only deals with death as a direct result of combat or armed violence.

Some 39,000 Iraqis have been killed as a direct result of combat or armed violence since the U.S.-led invasion, a figure considerably higher than previous estimates, a Swiss institute reported on Monday. The public database Iraqi Body Count, by comparison, estimates that between 22,787 and 25,814 Iraqi civilians have died since the March 2003 invasion, based on reports from at least two media sources. No official estimates of Iraqi casualties from the war have been issued, although military deaths from the U.S.-led coalition forces are closely tracked and now total 1,937.

The new estimate was compiled by the Geneva-based Graduate Institute of International Studies and published in its latest annual small arms survey, released at a U.N. news conference. It builds on a study published in The Lancet, a British medical journal, last October, which concluded there had been 100,000 “excess deaths” in Iraq from all causes since March 2003. That figure was derived by conducting surveys of Iraqi mortality data during the war and comparing the results to similar data collected before the war. Britain’s government rejected The Lancet’s conclusions shortly after their publication.

The survey’s release coincided with the opening of a weeklong U.N. conference intended to assess progress on a U.N. action plan for cracking down on the illicit global trade in small arms, adopted in 2001. While worldwide public attention is riveted on the devastating potential of biological, chemical and nuclear weapons, small arms typically carried by a single individual “are the real weapons of mass destruction,” said Ambassador Pasi Patokallio of Finland, the conference’s chairman.

Indirect deaths, like foul water is obviously not a factor in this equation.

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