Press Report
on Lancet Study
100,000 Excess Civilian Iraqi
Deaths Since War
By Patricia Reaney
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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 neighborhoods.
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.
Bulatlat
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