100,000 excess deaths reported in Iraq since the war started

[Stefu]

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=578&ncid=578&e=8&u=/nm/20041028/ts_nm/iraq_deaths_dc

Clearly Iraqis are better off now than under Saddam, aren't they?

[BeBMan]

But that's freedom! They can now blow themselves up!

[Sava]

air strikes from (U.S.-led) coalition forces accounted for the most violent deaths," the report added.

a great way to spread democracy!




the blood is on your hands, neo-conservatives... shame on all of you. May there be a God willing to forgive you for this insanity.

[alva]

Pffff, it was god who ordered them in the first place, according to his spokesperson.

[Spiffor]

Don't you understand that these dead Iraqis are now really free? They will never fear their brutal dictator for the rest of eternity!

[GePap]

I wonder what methodology they used that gave them a number so much higher than the generally accounted for number?

[Evil Knevil]

Originally posted by Spiffor
Don't you understand that these dead Iraqis are now really free? They will never fear their brutal dictator for the rest of eternity!

God? He's the most brutal dictator, surely?

[Dauphin]

Originally posted by GePap
I wonder what methodology they used that gave them a number so much higher than the generally accounted for number?

http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/world/wire/sns-ap-iraq-death-toll,0,7799287.story?coll=sns-ap-world-headlines

To conduct the survey, investigators visited 33 neighborhoods spread evenly across the country in September, randomly selecting clusters of 30 households to sample. Of the 988 households visited, 808, consisting of 7,868 people, agreed to participate in the survey. At each one they asked how many people lived in the home and how many births and deaths there had been since January 2002.

The scientists then compared death rates in the 15 months before the invasion with those that occurred during the 18 months after the attack and adjusted those numbers to account for the different time periods.

Even though the sample size appears small, this type of survey is considered accurate and acceptable by scientists and was used to calculate war deaths in Kosovo in the late 1990s.

The investigators worked in teams of three. Five of the six Iraqi interviewers were doctors and all six were fluent in English and Arabic.

In the households reporting deaths, the person who died had to be living there at the time of the death and for more than two months before to be counted. In an attempt at firmer confirmation, the interviewers asked for death certificates in 78 households and were provided them 63 times.

There were 46 deaths in the surveyed households before the war. After the invasion, there were 142 deaths. That is an increase from 5 deaths per 1,000 people per year to 12.3 per 1,000 people per year -- more than double.

However, more than a third of the post-invasion deaths were reported in one cluster of households in the city Falluja, where fighting has been most intense recently. Because the fighting was so severe there, the numbers from that location may have exaggerated the overall picture.

When the researchers recalculated the effect of the war without the statistics from Falluja, the deaths end up at 7.9 per 1,000 people per year -- still 1.5 times higher than before the war.

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by GePap
I wonder what methodology they used that gave them a number so much higher than the generally accounted for number?

they surveyed people and asked about deaths in the family for the 15 months prior to the invasion, and the months subsequent.

Whats VERY odd is that the alleged increase in death is entirely attributed to violence, and almost entirely to US bombardment. I would have expected increases in deaths due to disease (given widely publicized problems with hospitals and water right after the war) and in non-political crime (given the widely publicized increase in the murder rate in Baghdad after the war) , not to mention deaths at the hand of the insurgents.
Something is VERY fishy in these numbers.

[Harovan]

Originally posted by lord of the mark
Something is VERY fishy in these numbers.

What is the official US version of the numbers of Iraqi victims?

[Spiffor]

LOTM: are you sure that by "most violent deaths", they meant "most numerous deaths"?

I wouldn't be surprised if the families were more horrified by a death from bombing than by a death from disease / murder. And I wouldn't be surprised if the paper used a double-edged word in order to make the reader believe that most deaths come from American bombs. But I wonder if the actual results of the study are that the death toll essentially comes from aerial bombardment.

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by Sir Ralph


What is the official US version of the numbers of Iraqi victims?

I have no idea, but the antiwar Iraq Body County has much lower numbers IIRC, and their numbers have been critiqued as way too high by analysts such as Dave Adesnik at Oxblog.

[Spiffor]

Originally posted by Sir Ralph
What is the official US version of the numbers of Iraqi victims?

"We don't do body counts"

Independent sources like http://www.iraqbodycount.org/ estimate it between 14,000 and 16,000

[DanS]

These numbers seem really fishy.

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by Spiffor
LOTM: are you sure that by "most violent deaths", they meant "most numerous deaths"?

I wouldn't be surprised if the families were more horrified by a death from bombing than by a death from disease / murder. And I wouldn't be surprised if the paper used a double-edged word in order to make the reader believe that most deaths come from American bombs. But I wonder if the actual results of the study are that the death toll essentially comes from aerial bombardment.

"Violence accounted for most of the excess death and air strikes from (U.S.-led) coalition forces accounted for the most violent deaths," the report added"


Spiff, it really helps to read the linked article.

If I wuz on your said of things, id really consider waiting to use this till it had been out a couple of days.