Iraq: Death Don't Have No Mercy in This Land

A new study contends that nearly 655,000 Iraqis have died because of the war, a far higher death toll than most other estimates, and twice as many that are estimated to have died during the brutal rein of Saddam Hussein.

"Deaths are occurring in Iraq now at a rate more than three times that from before the invasion of March 2003," said Dr. Gilbert Burnham, lead author of the study. He said the estimate was much higher than others because it was derived from a house-to-house survey rather than approaches that depend on body counts or media reports.

The mortality rate before the American invasion was about 5.5 people per 1,000 per year, the study found. That rate rose to 19.8 deaths per 1,000 people in the year ending in June.

About 31 percent of the deaths were attributable to coalition forces.

The timing of the study's release four weeks before mid-term elections predictably led to charges that it was more politics than analysis, and the numbers were quickly disputed by President Bush, the Pentagon and Iraqi government.

The Iraqi government has clamped down on the release of information about civilian deaths and recently barred the central morgue in Baghdad and the Health Ministry from releasing figures to the news media. Now, only the government is allowed to release such figures.

The study by Burnham, of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and others is to be published on the Web site of The Lancet, a medical journal, but a pdf version is available here.

Researchers attempted to calculate how many more Iraqis have died since March 2003 than could be expected without the war. Their conclusion, based on interviews of households and not a body count, is that about 600,000 died from violence, mostly gunfire. They also found a small increase in deaths from other causes like heart disease and cancer.

"Deaths are occurring in Iraq now at a rate more than three times that from before the invasion of March 2003," Dr. Gilbert Burnham, lead author of the study, said in a statement.

An accurate count of Iraqi deaths has been difficult to obtain, but other groups have put the estimate at between 40,000 and 50,000, which makes me somewhat skeptical of Burnham's numbers although his methodology seems sound.

That methodology uses a number of sample households -- in this case 1,849 households with 12,801 residents surveyed from May through July -- and extrapolates death figures from there.

Notes my buddy Will Bunch at Attytood:

"There's an important nugget here. If the Hopkins survey is right, it could be the case that the last three years of mayhem in Iraq has claimed twice as many lives as died violently during the odious, 23-year regime of Saddam Hussein. Most experts looking at the Saddam years say that lives lost by internal repression and genocide against Kurds and Shia probably killed about 300,000 people."

Which plays right back into a perverse dynamic that I noted in a recent post titled George Bush & Saddam Hussein's Martyrdom.

President Bush continues to insist that the civilian death toll is only 30,000 and repeated that number again today. The consensus view of surveys and studies based on media reports, including the Iraqi Body Count, is between 40,000 and 50,000 deaths.