Colleagues,
This is not propaganda, it is a study made by scientists from John
Hopkins School of Public Health.
David
Civilian death toll in Iraq exceeds 100,000
Thu 28 October, 2004 20:14
By Patricia Reaney
LONDON (Reuters) - Tens of thousands of Iraqis have been killed in
violence since the U.S.-led invasion last year, American public health
experts have calculated in a report that estimates there were 100,000
"excess deaths" in 18 months.
The rise in the death rate was mainly due to violence and much of it was
caused by U.S. air strikes on towns and cities.
"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," Roberts told Reuters.
The report came just days before the U.S. 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 what they found as shocking.
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 U.S. military were killed in combat or attacks
and another 258 died in accidents or incidents not related to fighting,
according to the Pentagon.
VERY BAD FOR IRAQI CIVILIANS
The researchers blamed air strikes for many of the 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, said U.S. 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 in an interview.
The researchers did 33 cluster surveys of 30 households each, recording
the date, circumstances and cause of deaths.
They found that the risk of death from violence in the period after the
invasion was 58 times higher than before the war.
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 Falluja, the
insurgent held city 50 km (32 miles) west of Baghdad which had been
repeatedly hit by U.S. air strikes.
"Our results need further verification and should lead to changes to
reduce non-combatant deaths from air strikes," Roberts added in the
study.
Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet, said the research which was
submitted to the journal earlier 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," Horton said in an editorial.
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