Excess
Death In Iraq
By Dahr Jamail
14 October 2006
t
r u t h o u t
It is the single most important
statistic regarding the illegal US invasion and occupation of Iraq.
How many Iraqis have been killed?
655,000.
655,000 Iraqis killed as
a result of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq.
I have worked for eight months
in Iraq as a journalist, witnessing the carnage on a daily basis, visiting
the morgues with bodies and body parts piled into them, meeting family
after family who had lost a loved one, or more ... Finally, we get an
accurate figure that shows how immense the scale of the long drawn carnage
really is.
The first Lancet Report,
published on October 29, 2004, reported that there were 100,000 "excess"
Iraqi deaths as the result of the US invasion and occupation. (Excess
deaths are the difference between pre-invasion and post-invasion mortality
rates.) Whenever I have given public presentations about the occupation,
I have invariably found myself in a difficult position due to the lack
of a more realistic and recent figure I can cite, knowing full well
that the number was grossly higher than 100,000.
The least I could do was
mention that Les Roberts, one of the authors of that report, is known
to have said this past February that the number of Iraqi casualties
could be over 300,000. And now, we know it is far higher, which merely
confirms what most Iraqis already know.
In the context of the horror
stories that have reached us over the three-plus years of the occupation,
this latest figure is not nearly as shocking as when the first Lancet
report was published in October of 2004. It has been abundantly clear
since then that the number of Iraqis being killed by and because of
the occupation has continued to increase exponentially.
The recent survey, like the
first one, was conducted by Iraqi physicians and overseen by epidemiologists
at Johns Hopkins University's Bloomberg School of Public Health. The
findings are based on interviews with a random sampling of households
from across Iraq. This survey yielded the same estimate of deaths immediately
following the occupation, as the first survey. It also found that 30%
of the reported deaths are caused by the occupation forces.
This study is the only one,
other than the first study published in The Lancet, that calculates
mortality in Iraq using scientific methods. It is a technique of "cluster
sampling" also used to estimate mortality caused by famines and
after natural disasters.
The 2004 survey came under
fire from pro-war critics and from the supposedly anti-war group Iraq
Body Count (IBC) which currently claims a ridiculously low figure between
44 and 49,000 dead Iraqis. In the past, the figure generated by IBC
has been quoted by George W. Bush.
The controversial results
of the first survey were backed by Bradley Woodruff, a medical epidemiologist
at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who was quoted
in the Chronicle of Higher Education on January 27, 2005: "Les
[Les Roberts, co-author of the first survey] has used, and consistently
uses, the best possible methodology ... Indeed, the United Nations and
the State Department have cited mortality numbers compiled by Mr. Roberts
on previous conflicts as fact - and have acted on those results. [He]
has studied mortality caused by war since 1992, having done surveys
in locations including Bosnia, Congo, and Rwanda. His three surveys
in Congo for the International Rescue Committee, a nongovernmental humanitarian
organization, in which he used methods akin to those of his Iraq study,
received a great deal of attention. 'Tony Blair and Colin Powell have
quoted those results time and time again without any question as to
the precision or validity,' he added."
Further underscoring the
validity and authenticity of the survey methodology are two important
facts: first, that the leg work has been conducted by eight Iraqi doctors
and second, that the recent survey came up with the same estimate for
immediate post-invasion deaths as the previous survey. Additionally,
the figures are backed by official evidence as the greater majority
of deaths were substantiated by death certificates.
Ronald Waldman, an epidemiologist
at Columbia University who worked at the Center for Disease Control
and Prevention for several years, said that the survey method is "tried
and true," and that "this is the best estimate of mortality
we have." His view was backed by Sarah Leah Whitson at the Human
Rights Watch in New York, who testified, "We have no reason to
question the findings or the accuracy."
Here it is worth recording
that the survey's estimate of Iraq's pre-invasion death rate, which
was used as the baseline of the survey, was roughly the same as the
one used by both the CIA and the US Census Bureau.
As in the instance of the
first survey, this study found that the actual number of dead Iraqis
could in fact be higher. The fact that this study tabulated "excess
deaths" implies that these people would still be alive if the US
had not invaded their country.
While the staggeringly high
number of the dead may shock some, for others who have kept track of
facts it is no great wonder that surveyors have found a steady increase
in Iraqi mortality since the invasion and a steeper increase in the
last year. This alarmingly reflects the worsening violence which even
the US military, the news media and civilian groups have been forced
to admit.
Most of what we have heard
reported, prior to this survey, had been deaths in Baghdad, with headlines
like "50 Bodies Found in Baghdad" and "Baghdad Morgue
Reporting 100 Bodies per Day." They are stories that have failed
to take into account the rest of the country, although Baghdad is roughly
20% of the total population of Iraq. What has been happening in the
rest of the country is a question that the latest survey answers: that
there are approximately 500 unexpected violent deaths every single day
throughout Iraq.
The survey found that 87%
of the deaths had occurred during the occupation rather than during
the initial invasion, and that 31% of them were a consequence of attacks
and air strikes by the coalition forces.
It was no surprise that Mr.
Bush dismissed the findings of the study. He did not consider the report
credible and said that the methodology used was "pretty well discredited."
I'm sure that the feeble-minded Mr. Bush took a very close look at the
methodology used in the study.
Last December, Bush claimed
that 30,000 Iraqis had died as the result of the invasion and occupation.
When reporters asked him if he still stood by his estimate, he said
he stood by the figure that "a lot" of innocent people have
died in the conflict.
One of my contacts in Iraq,
a man who works with several Iraqi NGOs that monitor human rights abuses,
deaths, detentions and other violations of international law, was furious
when I asked him how he felt about IBC's attack on the outcome of the
first Lancet Report. I present his outburst here:
This is a mayday call
to all colleagues around the world to STOP writing about the Iraqi issue
without having enough information from reliable sources. People are
getting killed here and the country is virtually dying and it is not
so human to rob the dead! IBC supposedly worked to correct the number
of Iraqis killed because of the US occupation of Iraq. All I saw in
this violent attack upon The Lancet was a harsh offensive that adds
the killing of truth to whatever number of killings that actually took
place by gunfire and bombs.
Salih Al-Jabiri is a 55-year-old
human rights activist in Baghdad. Jabiri, commenting on the figure offered
by IBC at that time of roughly 30,000 dead Iraqis, the figure which
was infamously quoted by Mr. Bush, said, "What difference does
it make whether the number is 30,000 or 200,000 for God's sake? It is
people's lives you are counting here, not farm chickens! Do you people
mean we should be happy to believe US statistics of ONLY 30,000? But
we are not happy with this insultingly low number, when all of us know
the true number is so much higher!"
My aforementioned contact
added more recently:
Whatever the numbers
the crime is still big enough to be condemned by all those who claim
to be human beings. To our colleagues at IBC and those others who think
the way they do, we say, be human enough to condemn the crimes of the
occupation in Iraq or do not say you are humans.
For over a year now many
Iraqis have been referring to what is happening in their country as
genocide. With over 500 Iraqis being killed every single day as a direct
result of the occupation, it is difficult to argue with them.
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