Counting the dead

 According to Joe Lauria, writing on the 24 July, Netanyahu ‘has already officially killed more than 39,000 Palestinians [nearly 200,000 according to The Lancet]’. In an otherwise insightful article on the 19^th, Randa Abdel-Fattah, wrote of, ‘a genocide that has so far, on a recent conservative [sic] by the Lancet,...caused an estimated 186,000 deaths and counting’. Similarly, on 16 July, Michael Arria said, ‘A recent report from The Lancet estimates that the actual death toll in Gaza could be more than 186,000. So far.’ [my emphasis]

By the 24^th, he revised his approach, writing, ‘The British medical journal The Lancet estimates that the death toll of Israel’s genocidal onslaught on Gaza will reach at least an estimated 186,000 Palestinians.’ The next day, he toned his allegations down further, ‘The Lancet recently published a study estimating that the death toll in Gaza will reach at least 186,000.’

In reality, the document at issue is not the Lancet’s work, but a letter from three researchers, Rasha Khatib, Martin McKee, and Salim Yusuf. The central claim in the six paragraph letter, was,

In recent conflicts, such indirect deaths range from three to 15 times the number of direct deaths. Applying a conservative estimate of four indirect deaths per one direct death to the 37 396 deaths reported, it is not implausible to estimate that up to 186 000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza. [my emphasis]

An assertion that something is ‘not implausible’ inspires little confidence. It’s important to note that in the Lancet ‘letters are not normally externally peer reviewed’ and the letter does not report a study, per se, but merely a calculation based on the Ministry of Health’s report of total direct fatalities as at 19 June. The authors multiplied that number, 37 396, by a factor of four to arrive at a number of indirect fatalities. The source of the multiplier is a 2008 report on the Global Burden of Armed Violence, which actually reports the ratio between direct and indirect deaths in 13 specific conflicts as ranging from 0 (Kosovo 1998-99) to 15.7 (Sierra Leone 1991-2002) (Table 2.3, p. 40). Khatib et al. do not specify how they decided to select a factor of four other than that it seemed conservative to them.

Michael Spagat, a University of London economist, analysed their approach and pointed out that the 13 conflicts may not be representative, that the ratios reported may not be robust, and in any case, factors like Gaza’s population density and the level of attention it has attracted make the situation there unique.

Spagat expresses doubt whether the figure of 186 000 is a projection. But Khatib et al. write, ‘Even if the conflict ends immediately, there will continue to be many indirect deaths in the coming months and years from causes such as reproductive, communicable, and non-communicable diseases. The total death toll is expected to be large…’ [my emphasis], strongly suggesting that it is.

So it’s a distortion to write of ‘186,000 deaths and counting’ or ‘so far’, apart from the other exaggerations. Media Lens reports more accurately, ‘A recent study...points out that there will be many additional indirect deaths...the total death toll in Gaza may even exceed 186,000’. Even the New York Times manages a more cautious approach.

Back in February, Zeina Jamaluddine, et al. published a series of ‘Scenario-based health impact projections’, disaggregating fatalities into five categories: traumatic injuries, infections, maternal and neonatal deaths and stillbirths, non-communicable diseases (NCDs), and those attributable to malnutrition. They project deaths from these causes as of 6 August 2024 under three scenarios: an immediate ceasefire, the status quo, and escalation of military operations, arriving at estimates of up to 85 750, in the worst case, with very broad 95% uncertainty intervals. Ironically, Khatib, et al. cite the report, raising the questions of why they even bothered with their more hamfisted approach and why everyone has now latched onto Khatib, et al. when more plausible projections were already on the record.

The point is that misrepresenting the authorship and nature of the source, exaggerating the robustness of the data, and confusing a projection with a current estimate all invite scepticism of anything else one might have to say.

The real issue is that, for one thing, whatever may have transpired on 7 October can never justify any harm to even one uninvolved person, much less demolition of entire cities. For another, the dead are far from the only victims. Recent reports indicate 90,403 people injured, including children, some of whom may be disabled for life. Furthermore, as Khatib et al. and all other sources point out, Israel’s systematic demolition of Gaza’s medical infrastructure has made it increasingly difficult to keep track of both fatalities and injuries. And it’s worth noting that those treating life threatening injuries are likely to prioritise that work over recording accurate statistics.

As the Israeli military continue to wreak death and injury, increasing the number of direct casualties daily, the ‘destroyed health-care infrastructure; severe shortages of food, water, and shelter; the population's inability to flee to safe places; and the loss of funding to UNRWA, one of the very few humanitarian organisations still active in the Gaza Strip’ (Khatib, et al.) will go on multiplying the number of indirect victims by an unknown factor. The US, which had provided UNRWA with some 30% of its funding, has enacted legislation barring further contributions until next March.

The actual death toll from direct and indirect causes could end up exceeding Khatib, et al.’s guesstimate. Indeed, on 25 July, Feroze Sidhwa, et al. released their estimates, based on analysis of a wide range of publicly available sources.

With the known violent deaths [39,145], the estimated ten thousand people buried under the rubble and certainly dead, a conservative estimate of 38,000 deaths from malnutrition and disease, and a conservative estimate of 5,000 deaths in patients with chronic diseases, we estimate that the current death toll is likely upwards of 92,000...These are the most conservative estimates of the death toll that can be made with the given available data as of July 24, 2024. It is highly likely that the real number of deaths in Gaza from this conflict is far higher, and without an immediate ceasefire the death toll will only continue to mount.

And that will just be the tip of the iceberg. If Israel should fail to achieve the stated goal of forcing the population of Gaza into Egypt in a second Nakba, life among the ruins promises little but misery for the survivors, even the uninjured.

=========

Update:

According to a report on 25 July, Euro-Med Monitor estimates 

based on data and statistics gathered by its field teams in neighbourhoods and camps located within the Gaza Strip, as well as from information received from relevant authorities and institutions, including several hospitals and medical teams. These indicate that at least 51,000 people have died as a result of the Israeli blockade of the entire Strip; denial of medical care; collapse of the health sector due to Israel’s targeting and blockade; insufficient ambulance services due to said targeting and blockade, as well as a severe shortage of basic medicines, particularly for patients with chronic illnesses and cancer; prevention of the ability to travel abroad for treatment; and the spread of infectious diseases and epidemics. Accordingly, the natural death rate increased from an estimated 3.5 per 1,000 people prior to the start of the genocide to 22 per 1,000 people during the genocide.

'We do body counts'

Back in February, I made an attempt to project current estimates of excess Iraqi deaths since the march 2003 invasion on the basis of the estimates arrived at on the basis of the survey carried out by the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health and al Mustansariya University School of Medicine team of Burnham et al between May and July 2006 and published in The lancet last October.

The Johns Hopkins survey report in October that estimated the number of excess deaths in Iraq since the March 2003 invasion at about 655,000 was conducted in May-July last year. Iraqis have obviously continued dying since then, and at an accelerating pace, from all reports.

Deploying a slightly suspect methodology, I have averaged the estimate, along with the upper and lower limits of the 95% confidence interval that the Lancet paper reported, to arrive at new estimates. On this basis, the probable number of excess Iraqi deaths as of this month stands at 769,583. Projecting from the July figures, we would be 95% certain that the true number lies in the range between 461,750 and 1,107,597. And counting. Since the numbers dying is on the increase, this is almost certainly an underestimation and the probability that at least 450,000 have died is therefore very high. Clearly there’s no point in even asking why these numbers don’t see the light of day in the mainstream press – only American deaths count.

So, of the estimated pre invasion population of 27 million, the occupation troops have already killed at least 450,000, and perhaps as many as 1.1 million – that would be over 4% of the population, and counting…

The approach I adopted was to calculate a monthly average for the first 40 months since the invasion covered by the Burnham et al study and assume that the average monthly rate of excess deaths for the year to July 2006 persisted. I also calculated on the basis of the average over the forty months, which yielded an unrealistically low projection, and on the basis that the monthly death rate post July 2007 increased by as much over the June 2005-June 2006 rate as the June 2005-June 2006 rate had increased over the average monthly rate May 2004-May 2005, which yielded projections that looked unrealistically high.

Using the same method and projecting out to this month, I arrive at an estimate of 1,015,195, including non ‘violent’ deaths.

A recent Information Clearing House linked me to the Just Foreign Policy site, where they have developed a new counter. The way it works is to update Burnham’s estimate of some 601,000 excess deaths specifically from violent causes over the period between the US invasion in March 2003 and the survey in May-July 2006 on the basis of increases in the Iraq Body Count counter. IBC provides minimum and maximum counts due to the range of numbers reported in the media they rely on. The new counter divides the average of the current minimum and maximum by the average of the two figures for July 2006 and multiply it by 601,000 to arrive at an approximation of the probable current death toll from violent causes.

JFP are quite explicit in acknowledging that this method is likely to under estimate the actual number of deaths because IBC relies on media reports. As the situation for reporters in Iraq has become more and more dangerous, the proportion of deaths reported in the media inevitably declines. They are also aware of the incompatibility between the IBC claim only to report the deaths of non combatants and Burnham’s principled approach to not attempting to distinguish combatants from non combatants.

A point that Eli Stephens has made and I believe I’ve mentioned before is that when the media report an incident that kills 5 and injures 30, that’s the end of the story. There is never a follow up story reporting on the 23 who subsequently died of their injuries. That is one source of the gross understatement of Iraqi deaths that IBC continues to defend.

JFP are also explicit that what their counter is trying to enumerate is the number killed specifically as a result of the US invasion and occupation since 2003. That means above and beyond the already elevated mortality from the previous US (aka UN) military adventure in Mesopotamia and the subsequent campaign of boycott and bombing.

I note with some pleasure that Tom Feeley at ICH has finally started presenting a more accurate description of the nature of the projection, ‘Number Of Iraqis Slaughtered Since The U.S. Invaded Iraq 1,004,219’. As I’ve mentioned before, until 18 June, ICH announced, ‘Number Of Iraqi Civilians Slaughtered In America's War On Iraq - At Least 655,000 + +’. There are two problems with this formulation. The survey on which the estimate is based explicitly made no pretense of distinguishing combatant from civilian deaths. And the breadth of the 95% confidence interval means that there is a small possibility that the actual number killed could have been as ‘few’ as 392,979 at the time of the survey, so it is not appropriate to describe the midpoint estimate as ‘at least’.

Anyway, I think the JFP methodology is sound and the projection it generates is not far off my 1,015,195 projection, perhaps a little less than the discrepancies regarding violent and non combatant deaths would suggest. So I’ve installed the code and will display the JFP counter here unless someone shows me why the reasoning is faulty.

'They might snap'

In a recent exchange on lenin’s tomb, Sean Coleman, Ireland Campaign Manager, Sudan Divestment Task Force, wrote,

Now imagine the US military unveiled a new strategy in Iraq: …attacks will be conducted without any reference to civilians, merely to say that if you're a civilian killed by an American bomb, it was your own fault for your proximity to the insurgents and your lack of "protection". Any such policy would be decried as a murderous and monstrous way to prosecute a war. That is because it is. Supporting it - as in the case of those who lend support to Iraqi resistance - is, I think, concurrently lacking in moral sense.

Now, writes Tina Susman, the April murder of the teenage son of a Los Angeles Times employee in Baghdad has provided an opportunity to see what is really going on there.

The 17-year-old had been struck by a bullet in the chaos that followed the explosion and was bleeding heavily. Within two hours, the boy was dead. Witnesses charge he was killed by U.S. troops firing randomly.

U.S. military officials say troops are trained to avoid civilian casualties and do not fire wildly. Iraqis, however, say the shootings happen frequently and that even if troops are firing at suspected attackers, they often do so on city streets where bystanders are likely to be hit. Rarely is it possible to confirm such incidents…With more troops on the ground as a result of President Bush's "surge," U.S. military officials acknowledge that there are greater chances for civilian casualties.

"Being that we are doing more operations in places where we were not before, and doing operations in large numbers, there is just more contact with the enemy and therefore more chance of people on the periphery being involved in that," said Army Lt. Col. Christopher Garver, a military spokesman in Baghdad.

According to counterinsurgency expert Kalev Sepp, "you just end up with another group of foreign occupation troops shooting civilians who they feel threaten them when their car drives too close to them."

If the anecdotal evidence is an indication, such deaths often occur after troops are shaken by roadside bombs, as occurred when The Times employee's son was killed April 17.

"They were confused and angry and suspecting anyone around," Mohammed said. "If a bird had passed by, they would have shot it."

The U.S. military said troops shot in self-defense after being targeted first by the bomb and then by gunfire, but Mohammed and other witnesses denied that anybody shot at the soldiers.

"It's a psychological thing. When one U.S. soldier gets killed or injured, they shoot in vengeance," said Alaa Safi, who said his brother, Ahmed, was killed April 4 when U.S. troops riddled the streets of their southwestern Baghdad neighborhood with bullets after a sniper attack.

"I can't tell you that nobody got killed in that specific incident," Garver said. "In some instances, we're not able to know what really happened."

"You must be reasonably certain that your target is the source of the threat," the rules state.

Military officials have acknowledged, however, that the rules are sometimes broken in the heat of combat…troops "become stressed, they become fearful" on a battlefield where it is difficult to tell civilians from insurgents…"But I would say it's stress, fear, isolation, and in some cases they're just upset. They see their buddies getting blown up on occasion and they could snap."

And who could blame stressed and frightened kids from snapping under such conditions? Clearly they need to be disarmed and removed from harm’s way. At least if a concern for innocent bystanders is the point. What always seems to get lost in these news reports is that the IEDs and the snipers wouldn’t be attacking American troops if they weren’t there in the first place. Garver speaks of the insurgents as ‘the enemy’. But in reality, he and his troops are the enemy. The insurgents can’t just pack up and go home. They are home.

Last year, retired Lt. Col. Andrew J. Bacevich, a Vietnam veteran who is a professor of international relations at Boston University, estimated that U.S. troops alone had killed "tens of thousands" of innocent Iraqis, either by accident or through carelessness.

Even the troops directly involved in incidents often cannot say if civilian casualties have occurred.

So it’s no surprise that nobody is doing body counts. Furthermore

The challenge of reaching an accurate tally has become more acute since the military surge began.

The Iraqi government, eager to show that the security plan is working, has stopped releasing monthly civilian casualty figures to the United Nations, arguing that Cabinet ministries collecting the numbers were inflating them for political purposes.

The U.S. military rarely issues public reports on civilians it has killed or wounded. It did not respond to requests for information on civilians killed this year by U.S. troops.

And yet nobody wants to believe the estimates of excess deaths resulting from the invasion and occupation of Iraq from the only reliable source there is – the cluster survey carried out last July by a team from Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health and Al-Mustansariya University Medical School and published by Burnham et al. in the eminent British medical journal The lancet last October.

Susman writes, for example, ‘Estimates of civilians killed…range from tens of thousands to as many as 600,000.’ In reality, Burnham did not estimate civilian deaths at all for quite sound reasons. For one thing, they thought it could endanger the interviewers to probe too deeply into such matters. For another, in this context, it is simply not possible to distinguish reliably between civilians and combatants. And since the resistance only exists as a response to the occupation, those killed fighting the occupation are absolutely no less victims of the occupation than those who die without taking arms against their oppressors.

In contrast, Iraq Body Count’s (IBC) claim that it can rely on the mainstream media - i.e. 65 journalists holed up in the Green Zone or 'embedded' with Coalition troops - to distinguish reliably between combatants and non combatant deaths in each and every case is beyond naive. It is wilfully dishonest.

In this connection, I want to emphasise a point Eli Stevens always makes.

In the news today, a car bomb in Baghdad killed 23 people and injured 68 others, while later, a second killed 17 people and wounded 55 others. Will you ever hear what happened to those 123 injured people (or the others who were injured in incidents where the numbers of dead didn't reach double-digits, and weren't even "newsworthy" by the standards of American reporting on Iraq)? Not a chance. Will some, maybe even the majority, die later today in the hospital, or tomorrow, or next week? Quite likely. But according to the Western press (and those such as Iraq Body Count), 40 people died in those two incidents, a number which will never change.

So it never contributes to the IBC count. Obviously, this is not an issue with the Burnham team’s methodology.

Furthermore, Burnham et al did not estimate ‘as many as 600,000’ dead. They estimated about 655,000 excess deaths, although for statistical reasons, the true number could have been as low as 400,000 or as high as 940,000. And that was a year ago, a year moreover that has seen Iraqis dying at an accelerating rate. The current number of Iraqis who have died because of the occupation of their country is almost certainly a million or more.

While on the subject of Burnham et al again, apologists for the invasion have made a clumsy attempt to discredit their findings by suggesting that the sampling methodology deployed in the survey is subject to ‘main street bias’ (MSB). Interviewers were instructed to select a ‘residential street’ intersecting a main street, to select a dwelling at random, and to interview the household residing there and the next 39 households.

The MSB hypothesis relies on the assumption that the interviewers would have interpreted ‘main street’ as ‘principal thoroughfare’ and selected the first household in a street intersecting one of these that was itself a main street. It also assumes that car bombings and other killings would occur on these secondary main streets where markets are thought to be located. This is of course irrelevant, as those killed at a bazaar are not just those residing whose in the flat above it. Anybody buying or selling there is equally vulnerable, whether they live in the same building, in the same street, or somewhere else in the neighbourhood, or anywhere.

The 17 year old son of the LA Times employee lived

…in a middle-class neighborhood of split-level houses with balconies, driveways and cerise bougainvillea draping garden walls. The stroll took him down his quiet street to a commercial strip with small stores, butcher shops and cafes. Parallel to the strip is a median and then a highway, which passes beneath a concrete tangle of overpasses before heading to the airport. Blackened blotches are evidence of the frequency of attacks on troops patrolling it.

One tragic incident showing, among other things, that in a city full of rampaging stressed and frightened US troops armed to the teeth, you don’t have to live on a main street to be a victim of the violence they have unleashed.

Large attachments

'A dangerous place'

Four years ago tomorrow, on 8 April 2003, a 70 tonne Abrams tank under the command of Sergeant Shawn Gibson fired its 120mm cannon from its position on al-Jumhuriya Bridge into Room 1503 in the Palestine Hotel in Firdos Square, Baghdad, killing Taras Protsyuk of Reuters and Jose Cuoso of the Telecinco network in Spain. Earlier that morning, US jet fighters attacked Al Jazeera’s Baghdad offices, killing journalist Tareq Ayyoub.

On 23 March 2005, Democracy Now! broadcast exerpts from the Spanish documentary, ‘Hotel Palestine: Killing the Witness’, produced by Telecinco. Spanish Journalist Jon Sistiaga said,

My opinion is that there was a deliberate intent to fire on the journalists' hotel…First, they get rid of the offices of Al-Jazeera TV, half an hour later, they shoot the offices of Abu Dhabi TV, and half an hour after that, the same tank, why not, shoots at the hotel where other international journalists are staying… And what they did not want under any circumstances was almost 300 journalists, non-American, and not under their control, that is, that would not exercise patriotic self-censorship, ready to cover whatever might happen.

Another Spanish journalist said,

So, they had to know perfectly well where we were, and there was no mistake. There could be no mistake.

US Secretary of State Colin Powell confirmed on 2 May that

We knew about the hotel. We knew that it was a hotel where journalists were located, and others, and it is for that reason it was not attacked during any phase of the aerial campaign.

When Spanish Prime Minister Aznar visited the US, a Spanish reporter asked US President Bush, whether he thought Couso’s killing was a mistake and whether he would apologise to Couso’s family for his death, he replied, ‘I think war is a dangerous place.’

And so it is. War is an exceedingly dangerous place, especially if you’re an unembedeed journalist. Since the US invaded Iraq in 2003, at least 196 journalists have been killed, according to the International Federation of Journalists, 23 of them this year alone.

“Four years on still no credible reports have been produced to explain these attacks and no one has been held to account for the killings,” said IFJ General Secretary Aidan White. “The United States must answer questions that are still asked over these deaths and many others at the hands of their troops in Iraq. With the number of media casualties growing daily, impunity becomes intolerable, particularly when it concerns the actions of those who speak in the name of democracy and human rights.”

In December 2006, the United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 1738, a measure championed by the IFJ and its member unions that protects journalists in conflict zones and says killing them can be considered a war crime.

The IFJ has also demanded action over the deaths of British ITN reporter Terry Lloyd and his colleagues Fred Nérac and Hussein Osman, whose bodies are still missing, in a fire fight between US and Iraqi troops near Basra, in March 2003 as the invasion of Iraq gathered pace and has raised questions over the shooting by US soldiers of Reuters cameramen Mazen Dana.

One the Independent’s veteran Middle East correspondents, Patrick Cockburn, recently pointed out

The difficulty of reporting Iraq is that it is impossibly dangerous to know what is happening in most of the country outside central Baghdad. Bush and Blair hint that large parts of Iraq are at peace; untrue, but difficult to disprove without getting killed in the attempt.

In the April/May 2007 issue of American Journalism Review, Sherry Ricchiardi observes

The relentless violence in Iraq has seriously compromised coverage of arguably the most important story in the world today. Certain facets of the conflict remain exasperatingly elusive or, at best, thinly reported. The media's vital role as eyewitness has been severely limited; the intimate narrative of victims, survivors and their persecutors is sorely lacking in places like Anbar Province...

And the roster of correspondents seems far too small for the daunting task. Escalating threats to foreigners and astronomical security costs have led media companies to scale back their staffs.

…Correspondents are hamstrung when it comes to independently verifying information from military press briefings or rhetoric from the Pentagon. Without risking their lives, they can't go into the festering city of Fallujah or certain Baghdad neighborhoods to conduct their own investigations. Embedding is an alternative, but it offers a limited view under scrutiny of the military.

…Many operate on the 15-minute rule: They never stay longer in any one place for fear that someone with a cell phone will alert killers that a soft target is in play.

"You cannot move; you cannot go anywhere on your own," says Detroit Free Press photojournalist David Gilkey, who returned from his eighth trip to Iraq in January…"Every time you get out of the vehicle, you are almost paralyzed, with your eyes darting around looking for where the shot might come from. Every time you are riding around it's all you can do to keep from plugging your ears, waiting for the blast to happen," says Gilkey, who survived an IED explosion on his last trip.

All but a handful of media organizations have been driven out by the high cost and risks. The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the AP, and the broadcast and cable news networks are among the stalwarts. Even for those willing to bleed dollars for top-line security, newsgathering remains a struggle.

No one knows for certain how many journalists are in Iraq at any given time. The best guess from those on the ground is 50 to 60 on a consistent basis.

New York Times correspondent Dexter Filkins…recalls that in the early days, several hundred journalists packed into an auditorium in the Green Zone to attend press conferences. When he left in September, about a half dozen were showing up…Compared with Iraq, "Afghanistan was a tea party," says the correspondent,…"The people there are working incredibly hard and are working heroically, taking increasing risks to stitch [the story] together and get as much as they can. But there's still an awful lot we don't know."

A few days ago, on 26 March, the BBC revealed that, speaking of the results of the joint Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health/Al Mustansiriya University School of Medicine study published in the impeccable peer reviewed British medical journal The Lancet on 11 October,

a memo by the MoD's [Ministry of Defence] Chief Scientific Adviser, Sir Roy Anderson, on 13 October, states: "The study design is robust and employs methods that are regarded as close to "best practice" in this area, given the difficulties of data collection and verification in the present circumstances in Iraq."

But, ‘Shortly after the publication of the survey in October last year Tony Blair's official spokesperson said the Lancet's figure was not anywhere near accurate.’ The day the report was released, President Bush told a press conference,

I don't consider it a credible report. Neither does General Casey and neither do Iraqi officials…the methodology was pretty well discredited…I stand by the figure [of 30,000]. A lot of innocent people have lost their life -- 600,000, or whatever they guessed at, is just -- it's not credible.

Obviously, there’s no quibbling with ironclad irrefutable presidential reasoning like that. And sure enough, just five days later, Iraq Body Count, the source of President Bush’s figure of 30,000 deaths, issued a lengthy press release entitled, ‘Reality checks: some responses to the latest Lancet estimates’, explaining why their counts of Iraqi civilian deaths were superior to the Johns Hopkins study estimate.

In an 18 March press release, however, IBC admits

Iraq Body Count (IBC) compiles data from news reports to provide a baseline number of confirmed fatalities, but it should be noted that many deaths will likely go unreported or unrecorded by officials and media. [my emphasis]

But just two days later, in a letter to the World Socialist Website, drawn to my attention by lenin, they are back to the strident criticism of the Johns Hopkins study.

The study’s central estimate of over 600,000 violent deaths seems exceptionally high. Even its lower bound 95 percent confidence interval of 426,000 violent deaths is shockingly high. It is very unlikely that incidents of this scale would be so consistently discounted by the various media in Iraq.

Not only do they reject the study’s central estimate,

the data presented do not distinguish between civilian and combatant deaths. IBC’s work is confined to violent civilian deaths.

As the press release asserted,

Further, IBC statistics refer solely to violent incidents which caused civilian deaths. They do not include violent incidents which produced no casualties or caused only injuries, nor incidents targeting and killing only military or paramilitary personnel.

This insistence on counting only civilian deaths has always annoyed me. As Bill Van Auken of the WSWS editorial board wrote in his reply,

Politically, the deaths—both those of combatants and civilians, not to mention the thousands of young Iraqi conscript soldiers blown to pieces in the initial campaign of “shock and awe” bombardment—all represent the human catastrophe inflicted upon Iraq by the US war.

If there were no occupation, there would be no insurgency. Deaths of combatants are just as tragic and avoidable consequences of the invasion as civilian deaths. The authors of the Johns Hopkins study were quite explicit that

Separation of combatant from non-combatant deaths during interviews was not attempted, since such information would probably be concealed by household informants, and to ask about this could put interviewers at risk.

So how can the IBC be so sure that it is counting only civilian deaths?

The project relies on the professional rigour of the approved reporting agencies. It is assumed that any agency that has attained a respected international status operates its own rigorous checks before publishing items (including, where possible, eye-witness and confidential sources). By requiring that two independent agencies publish a report before we are willing to add it to the count, we are premising our own count on the self-correcting nature of the increasingly inter-connected international media network.

On the day the Lancet report was released, anticipating controversy, I discussed the IBC methodology. It will come as no surprise that I consider it a trifle naïve and gullible to rely on the ‘professional rigour’ of the mainstream media. But it’s not just their standards that are of concern. Now we know that there are only about 60 journalists in that whole country and they are quite justifiably frightened to venture out. When they do, many will not stay in one place for more than fifteen minutes. What would really be surprising under the circumstances would be for them to manage to capture even ten percent of the deaths in a country that size, with 150,000 bloodthirsty US soldiers armed to the teeth rampaging around, their ‘Salvador option’ death squads on the loose, various insurgent groups staging scores of attacks a day, not always as accurately targetted as they might be, and a range of ethnic militia feuding and settling vendettas.

And as for reliably distinguishing civilians from combatants, it hardly seems likely, even in the few cases that reporters witness first hand. Reports from the occupation authorities and the military are likely to claim anyone they kill as a ‘terrorist’. By definition. After all, they are the liberators.

Another factor that needs to be explicit, as Eli Stephens wrote yesterday on Left I on the news

…what you don't see is a phrase like this: "Eight more people died in Iraqi hospitals as a result of wounds inflicted in yesterday's car bombing/last week's IED explosion/last month's market bombing." I don't know about you readers, but I can say honestly I have never seen such a statement in the news, which means that Iraq Body Count, which tallies news reports, can't possibly include such deaths.

As Gilbert Burnham, lead author of the study wrote to WSWS,

Almost everything we know about mortality, disease prevalence, causes of deaths in probably 80 percent of the world’s population is derived from surveys—usually cluster surveys such as the one we carried out in Iraq. How many people died in Darfur? In Kosovo? In Congo? What is the death rate in Uganda, or Cambodia, or Angola? The answer almost without exception comes from cluster surveys.

When there is such vigorous denial of a standard demographic and epidemiological tool as the cluster survey, one needs to look for other reasons why the results are not acceptable.

It’s really a shame that IBC have become so shrill and defensive, as van Aucken wrote,

No doubt, the tallying of media-reported deaths in Iraq served a useful purpose under conditions in which the attitude of the American occupiers was summed up in the remark by Gen. Tommy Franks: “We don’t do body counts.”

Now, however, under conditions in which the governments responsible for this war and the mass media which helped them promote it are utilizing IBC’s figure of 60,000 deaths as a means of covering up the real magnitude of the disaster in Iraq, it seems self-evident that the principal responsibility confronting IBC would be to denounce and expose this misuse of its data, which, as the organization itself acknowledges, leave “most civilian casualties ...unreported.”

Toll dwarfed?

A few days ago, lenin had a piece quoting extensively from Anthony Arnove’s article on Tomdispatch drawing a comparison between the treatment of statistics of the tragedy in Darfur and in Iraq. According to Arnove,

Since 2003, according to UN estimates, some 200,000 have been killed in the Darfur region of Sudan in a brutal ethnic-cleansing campaign and another 2 million have been turned into refugees.

How would you know this? Well, if you lived in New York City, at least, you could hardly take a subway ride without seeing an ad that reads: "400,000 dead. Millions uniting to save Darfur." The New York Times has also regularly featured full-page ads describing the "genocide" in Darfur and calling for intervention there under "a chain of command allowing necessary and timely military action without approval from distant political or civilian personnel."… celebrities on Good Morning America talking about their commitment to stopping "genocide" in Iraq.

The point of this post is not, however to discuss the reasons for the discrepancy between all the noise about Darfur and the silence about Iraq. Apart from those two articles, Arnove cites ‘The Politics of Naming: Genocide, Civil War, Insurgency’ by Mahmood Mamdani in the latest London review of books. In a later piece, lenin returns to the theme, citing Ed Herman’s recent article on the ‘“Worthy-Genocide” Establishment’.

One of the ironies is that the emphasis on the Darfur crisis is not related to its scale. While the latest UN assessment, cited by Arnove, claims ‘More than 200,000 people have been killed and at least 2 million others forced from their homes since 2003’, estimates of Iraqi deaths and displacement are much higher. According to the latest information on their website,

UNHCR estimates there are some 1.9 million Iraqis displaced internally, and up to 2 million in neighbouring states, particularly Syria and Jordan...in 2006 Iraqis had become the leading nationality seeking asylum in Europe…By early 2007, internal displacement was estimated to be continuing at a rate of up to 50,000 a month.

In other words, the US occupation of Iraq has displaced nearly twice as many people as the situation in Darfur, universally condemned as genocide. In another cruel irony that I’ve covered before, the US has only accepted as refugees 466 of the two million Iraqis it drove from their country.

What really prompted this post is that while Arnove and others continue to cite the Johns Hopkins study estimate of 655,000 excess deaths published in the Lancet last October, Information Clearinghouse posted an article entitled ‘Deaths In Iraq Have Reached 1 Million’, dated 22 March. Attributed to an ‘Alan Jones’ but not linked to any source, it starts out by claiming,

THE number of deaths in Iraq since the start of the conflict could be as high as one million, it was claimed yesterday.

On the fourth anniversary of the invasion by Allied troops, an Australian scientist insisted the true death toll dwarfed previous estimates.

Dr Gideon Polya said: "Using the most comprehensive and authoritative literature and UN demographic data yields an estimate of one million post-invasion excess deaths in Iraq."

The article does in fact link to Dr Polya’s Global Avoidable Mortality blog, where the most recent post, dated 16 May 2006, relates to Israeli and Palestinian deaths.

In reality, the ICH article appears to relate not to anything published on 21 March, but to Dr Polya's 1 March editorial on his Media With Conscience site. He actually presents the same analysis in a 7 February Countercurrents article.

In the 7 February article, Polya writes, ‘the post-invasion excess deaths (avoidable deaths, deaths that did not have to happen) total 1.0 million (ONE MILLION)’. This is his reasoning,

Consider the following estimate from the Johns Hopkins medical scientists of "annual death rate per 1,000 of population" of 13.3 (post-invasion Iraq) as compared to (a) 5.5 (for pre-invasion Iraq after 12 years of crippling Sanctions) and (b) 4.0 (for Iraq's resource-poor but peaceful neighbours Syria and Jordan; UN Population Division data: http://esa.un.org/unpp/).

The "post-invasion excess death rate/1000 of population" was 13.3 - 5.5 = 7.8 (Comparison A) or 13.3 - 4.0 = 9.3 (Comparison B). Assuming an average population of 27 million, the "post-invasion excess deaths" total (over 4 years i.e. as of February 2007) (A) 7.8 x 2,700 x 4 = 842,000 and (B) 9.3 x 2,700 x 4 = 1,004,400 i.e. ONE MILLION.

In other words, the estimate of one million is arrived at by multiplying the difference between the Johns Hopkins study’s estimate of deaths per 1000 in Iraq over the 40 months to July 2006 and the UN estimate of deaths per 1000 population in Syria and Jordan at an unspecified date. Note that the link he provides is to a database that provides population projections. There probably are UN crude mortality rate (CMR) data for Syria and Jordan available, but not at any of the URLs he cites in either the MWC or the Countercurrents articles.

As far as I’m concerned, it’s not really outrageous to compare the post invasion Iraqi crude mortality rate with the rate for a neighbouring country. The rationale is that preinvasion mortality in Iraq was already inflated by the twelve years of sanctions. But by using the Syrian data as the benchmark, Polya is effectively factoring in the sanctions’ effects rather than isolating the effects of the invasion and occupation. Apart from that, there may be any number of other factors that might render the mortality rate in Syria or Jordan not comparable with that in Iraq. Perhaps more importantly, there is no possibility of the mainstream media treating a comparison like this seriously. So the relevant estimate is really his ‘Comparison A’, which, based on the Lancet study’s estimate of crude death rates in Iraq before and after the invasion, arrives at a figure of 842,000 (not 1 million!) for the four years to March 2007.

I’ve made attempts to update the Lancet estimate before, but the Lancet data are now eight months old and we know the slaughter has proceeded, by all accounts at an accelerating pace, we need some new estimates. The report of Polya’s estimate has prompted me to take it a little further. This is not to cast aspersions on Polya’s method, but I have adopted a different approach.

The Lancet estimates published last October cover the period March 2003 through June 2006. The estimated average monthly crude death rate for the fourteen months through April 2004 was 7,017. For the thirteen months from May 2004 to May 2005, the average was 15,115 per month, and for the last thirteen months June 2005 to June 2006, 27,710.

The method I am using is to assume that the Lancet estimates are correct as a starting point and increment them for the eight months since July 2006 based on monthly averages. I have calculated projections using three assumptions. As I am not actually weighting new data, but just projecting from the July 2006 data on the basis of some assumptions about the probable average monthly rate of increase, I will round the figures to the nearest thousand.

First, if we assume that the monthly rate of deaths over the last eight months was equivalent to the average of the forty months from March 2003 to July 2006, 16,373 per month, the current toll would stand at about 786,000. I regard this as highly improbable, as it would mean that the average monthly crude death rate had decreased by 41% from the 2005-2006 average.

Second, if we assume that the monthly rate has remained at the average for the 2005-2006 period, the total would now come to 877,000.

Third, if we assume that the current average monthly crude death rate has increased proportionally by as much over the 2005-2006 average as that average increased over the previous thirteen month period, by about 83%, the monthly average would now be 50,801 and the total to date, 1,061,000.

Bear in mind that these are based on statistical estimates each of which represents the approximate midpoint of a range of values. Principally because the size of the sample in the Johns Hopkins study, the confidence interval is wide. The claim the authors, Gilbert Burnham, Riyadh Lafta, Shannon Doocy, and Les Roberts, made was that they were 95% confident that the true number of excess deaths in July was between 393,000 and 943,000. Using the same confidence interval proportionally, in the first and least likely scenario, where the monthly rate had decreased, we would be talking about a range of 472,000 to 1,131,000. In the second scenario, where the rate had remained constant from last year, it would be between 526,000 and 1,262,000. Finally, if the average monthly crude death rate has increased as much as it did between 2004-05 and 2005-06, the range is 637,000 to 1,528,000.

The following table may clarify the results.

		Estimate	95% Confidence interval
			Minimum	Maximum
Lancet estimate to 2006 07		654,965	392,979	942,636
Polya’s estimate	Iraq baseline	842,000	n/a	n/a
	Syria baseline	1,004,400	n/a	n/a
My projection assuming increase at:	Per month
A. 2003-2006 average rate	16,373	786,000	472,000	1,131,000
B. 2005-2006 average rate	27,710	877,000	526,000*	1,262,000
C. 83% above B.	50,801	1,061,000**	637,000	1,528,000

* The true death toll is almost certainly more than 526,000.

** The probable death toll is 1,061,000.

From all reports, the rate of increase has been increasing itself, so even these highest projections are likely to be on the low side. Conservatively speaking, I think you could claim with nearly 100% confidence that the crude mortality rate over the last eight months has certainly not decreased from the average of the previous thirteen month period and that the US invasion and occupation has cost at least 525,000 Iraqi lives over the last four years. If, as seems probable, the CMR has in fact increased since last July, the figure is very likely to be over a million and could exceed a million and a half.

The central point is that, horrific though the situation is in Darfur, estimates based on similar methods demonstrate that it is in fact much much worse in Iraq, where the US, UK, and Australian governments bear direct responsibility for the catastrophe.

An ancillary point is how we use these statistics. At the top of the daily ICH email and the ICH site it asserts, ‘Number Of Iraqi Civilians Slaughtered In America's War On Iraq - At Least 655,000 + +’. I thought that the Johns Hopkins University team did good work under dangerous conditions and have done the peace movement a big favour by publishing their results in the prestigious and impeccable Lancet journal. Sorry to split hairs, if that’s what it is, but I think it would be fair to treat their findings as if we believed what they said.

What they actually found was that there were 654,965 excess deaths in Iraq over the 40 months to July 2006. Specifically, they were 95% certain that the number of people who had died since the 20 March 2003 invasion who would not have died otherwise, was in the range 392,979 to 942,636. As I have pointed out before, Burnham et al. do not say that at least 655,000 civilians were slaughtered.

For one thing, if there is an ‘at least figure, it is not 654,965, but 392,979. For another, the Johns Hopkins study is absolutely explicit that, ‘Separation of combatant from non-combatant deaths during interviews was not attempted…’ So their research provides no basis for any claim specifically about ‘civilians’. Finally, these estimates are for deaths from all causes. The relevant estimate of specifically violent deaths to July 2006 is 601,027 (i.e. in the range 426,369–793,663). Presumably, that would be the number slaughtered.

It’s not as if the Lancet study’s findings were not sensational enough. There’s no need to distort them as ICH continues to do, much less to headline Polya’s 1 million figure, which explicitly includes sanctions effects with the invasion and occupation.

In my view, the safest, most responsible approach remains to be to cite ‘the July 2006 estimate of about 655,000’. Alternatively, as Eli Stephens of Left I on the news points out, the confidence that the true figure is above 393,979 is nearly 98%, so it would be even more accurate to assert that the invasion and occupation of Iraq killed ‘at least 394,000’ by July 2006. However, I am fairly comfortable that my projections provide a sound basis for asserting that the current death toll definitely exceeds half a million, is probably much higher, and possibly three times that number.

More damed lies?

Yesterday, the UN Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI) released its human rights report for November-December 2006. It claimed,

For 2006, the total number of civilians violently killed is 34,452: 16,867 from the Medical Legal Institute in Baghdad (unidentified bodies) and 17,585 from hospitals (operation centres) throughout Iraq. The yearly average is 94 civilians killed every day.

Estimates of the numbers of victims of the US led invasion and occupation of Iraq have always aroused controversy, and this one promises to be no different. In fact, Dr. Hakem al-Zamili, Iraq's deputy health minister,

told The Associated Press the United Nations may be using unreliable sources for its casualty count. "They might be taking the figures from people who are opposed to the government or to the Americans," he said. "They are not accurate." He said he would provide Iraqi government figures later this week.

In early January, a compilation of Iraqi government figures put last year's civilian deaths at just 12,357.

Meanwhile, Iraq Body Count claims a total of civilian deaths for 2006 of between 19,535 and 21,036, half again as high as the Iraqi ‘government’ figures, but much lower than the UN claim. The Lancet study published on 11 October only estimated deaths through the study enumeration period between May and July last year, so there is no estimate for either the November-December 2006 period, or for 2006 as a whole.

To complicate matters, the UN does not appear to have published a total of all deaths since the invasion. For the purpose of comparison, assuming Iraqis have died at a constant rate over the period since March 2003, that would come to a total of about 132,000. As the rate has been accelerating, this total is necessarily high.

It is worth looking at the methodologies used to calculate each figure to achieve a better idea of which might provide a closer representation of the actual scale of destruction.

The UNAMI report does not discuss methodology. The only relevant information is the footnote on page 4,

Figures of civilians violently killed and wounded are based on the number of casualties compiled by the Ministry of Health from hospitals throughout the country and the Medico-Legal Institute in Baghdad. It should be noted that for the month of December, figures from some Governorates were not yet included in the total provided.

So this report is presenting not a statistical estimate, but an actual count based on reports from two Iraqi government sources. It is widely understood that the Iraqi government is constrained by the fact that the country it is supposed to govern is actually occupied by scores of thousands of foreign troops armed to the teeth. If that didn’t complicate the collection of administrative data of this kind enough, the insurgency that has arisen in response to the occupation largely regards the government and those cooperating with it as tools of the occupation, making collection of government data even more difficult and dangerous. It is curious that the Ministry of Health itself, one of UNAMI’s two sources, disputes UNAMI’s figures.

Last month, Ashraf Qazi, the senior United Nations envoy to Iraq, ‘cited statistics illustrating the stark problems facing Iraq, where more than 5,000 people die violent deaths each month’. Magazzeni reports, ‘According to information made available to UNAMI, 6,376 civilians were violently killed in November and December 2006’ [my emphasis]. So Qazi’s claim is nearly 40% higher than the more recent count. A possible source of the discrepancy is that Qazi is counting all persons, while Magazzeni is only counting specifically civilians specifically killed in sectarian violence. My inclination is to doubt that this distinction truly accounts for the discrepancy, because it is very common for reports of this kind to use undefined terms loosely. I suspect that on the one hand, Qazi was pulling a number out of a hat rather than relying on specific sources and calculations, and that Magazzeni’s sources can not reliably distinguish either civilians from combatants or victims of sectarian violence from, say, criminal violence.

Iraq Body Count, in contrast, is very explicit about exactly what they count. According to their methodology page, IBC provides a count of

media-reported civilian deaths in Iraq that have resulted from the 2003 military intervention by the USA and its allies. The count includes civilian deaths caused by coalition military action and by military or paramilitary responses to the coalition presence (e.g. insurgent and terrorist attacks).

It also includes excess civilian deaths caused by criminal action resulting from the breakdown in law and order which followed the coalition invasion.

It is simply a count of deaths reported in at least two independent media sources:

For a source to be considered acceptable to this project it must comply with the following standards: (1) site updated at least daily; (2) all stories separately archived on the site, with a unique url; (3) source widely cited or referenced by other sources; (4) English Language site; (5) fully public (preferably free) web-access.

The project relies on the professional rigour of the approved reporting agencies. It is assumed that any agency that has attained a respected international status operates its own rigorous checks before publishing items (including, where possible, eye-witness and confidential sources). By requiring that two independent agencies publish a report before we are willing to add it to the count, we are premising our own count on the self-correcting nature of the increasingly inter-connected international media network. http://www.iraqbodycount.org/background.php

The site lists 38 sources identified as ‘some core sources’. It is not at all clear whether this list is comprehensive or indicative, and if not exhaustive, what proportion of all core sources it comprises. Nor do we know whether non core sources are being used, which ones, when, or on what basis. Anyway, among the ‘core sources’ they mention are such beacons of truth as Fox news, the London Telegraph, the Toronto Star (but not the slightly more reputable Globe and mail), and of course the NYT.

When IBC write of ‘two independent agencies’, they can only mean that the reports come from completely independent sources. So if the NYT reports what AFP said, that should not count as a second report. Ultimately, it seems to mean that at least two different reporters have to have interviewed witnesses or seen documentation of a death before it adds to the IBC count. We know that the vast majority of reporters in Iraq are either holed up in the Emerald City far from the action or embedded with the occupation forces. Some reports may exist that are never published for editorial reasons. Under the circumstances, it is hardly surprising that only a fraction of the total number of deaths that actually occur are reported, and an even smaller fraction independently reported by two separate agencies.

IBC rely on the ‘professional rigour’ of the mainstream media not only for numbers but, like the UN sources, to determine whether a corpse was in life a civilian or a combatant. It is notoriously difficult to make this distinction in the kind of counterinsurgency that’s going on in Iraq and I think it must be particularly difficult in a society where nearly everyone is armed.

The Lancet study has its drawbacks. As a survey rather than a count like the administrative data the UN rely on or the media reports IBC uses, the number arrived at is inherently fuzzy. Because of the necessarily small sample, in this case, the authors are 95% confident that the actual number of violent deaths lies somewhere between 426 369 and 793 663. That’s not very accurate, and the authors are honest about it. It’s important to remember that a statistical 'estimate' is not just a guess - it is calculated by multiplying the number of actual observations by the weights, i.e. the proportion of the population represented in the sample.

Furthermore, the cluster sampling method adopted is unlikely to provide the level of accuracy we’d expect from an ordinary sample survey. For logistical reasons, however, this is the universally accepted method of sampling in studies of this kind in areas that present dangers to the collectors. The definition of a household the researchers used is not awfully satisfactory, but is very unlikely to have impacted on estimates. The total population of Iraq is not known with great accuracy and this does impact on the calculation of the weights by which the actual observations are multiplied, but this is the case wherever robust systems for recording births and deaths are absent, which means most of the world, and statistics from, for example, Pakistan, are not treated as controversial. Unlike the UN, Iraqi government, and IBC counts, the Lancet study does not pretend to distinguish combatants from non combatants.

There are two important things to note. First of all, the lowest probable number of estimated deaths is much higher than the deliberately high extrapolations I calculated from the UN data, which come to some 127,500 on the basis of the Magazzeni report and 200,000 on the basis of Qazi’s figure for the forty months to July, and nearly ten times the IBC figure of 43714/48556 for July 2006. (Note that the IBC minimum and maximum figures do not represent the extremes of a statistical confidence interval, but are separate counts arrived at where sources are inconsistent.)

The second thing to bear in mind is that the probability that the actual number dying from violent causes over the relevant period is exactly as likely to be 793,663 as it is to be 426,369. There is no reason to consider the lower estimate more plausible. That said, based in part on the reasoning presented by Eli Stephens, of the Left i on the news blog, if we are 95% certain the true figure is in the range 426 369 - 793 663, then we are more than 95% certain that it is at least 426 369.

In summary, then, we are more than 95% confident that, as of July, well over 400,000 Iraqis fell pray to the violence deliberately unleashed by the US led invasion. In contrast, we are 100% certain that the quisling Iraqi government’s own figures are likely to be undercounts, even in the implausible eventuality that they are not being cynically tampered with. These in turn form the basis for the UNAMI figures, which are therefore suspect. We are also 100% confident that the media can not possibly know of all Iraqi deaths and IBC’s extremely cautious methodology ensures that the number will in any case be minimized.

Even if the government and media sources could really reliably distinguish a civilian body from a combatant body and did so, it would not account for the discrepancy between their counts and the Lancet study estimates. It’s also worth pointing out that most of the ‘combatants’ killed in the counterinsurgency – those who really are combatants – are only in combat because of the invasion and occupation that they are quite legitimately resisting. So attempting to exclude them from the war toll is deeply cynical.

Speaking from Kuwait, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, in an uncharacteristically honest moment, said,

"Violent people will always be able to kill innocent people," she said.…"But whatever the number of civilians who have died in Iraq - and there obviously are competing numbers - but whatever the number is, it's too many," she said.

If only she and her violent mates would stop killing innocent people.