1.2 Million Human Beings Dead in Iraq
A survey of the population of Iraq which was released in 2008, stated that up to 1.2 million people have died because of the conflict in Iraq - this lends weight to the 2006 Lancet survey that reported similarly high levels.
More than one million deaths were already being suggested by anti-war campaigners, but such high counts have consistently been rejected by US and UK officials. The estimates, extrapolated from a sample of 1,461 adults around the country, were collected by a British polling agency, ORB, which asked a random selection of Iraqis how many people living in their household had died as a result of the violence rather than from natural causes.
Previous estimates gave a range between 390,000 and 940,000, the most prominent of which – collected by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and reported in the Lancet in October 2006 – suggested 654,965 deaths.
Although the household survey was carried out by a polling organisation, rather than researchers, it has again raised the spectre that the 2003 invasion has caused a far more substantial death toll than officially acknowledged.
The ORB survey follows an earlier report by the organisation which suggested that one in four Iraqi adults had lost a family member to violence. The latest survey suggests that in Baghdad that number is as high as one in two. If true, these latest figures would suggest the death toll in Iraq now exceeds that of the Rwandan genocide in which about 800,000 died.
The Lancet survey was criticised by some experts and by US President George Bush and British officials. In private, however, Britain’s Ministry of Defence’s chief scientific adviser Sir Roy Anderson described it as ‘close to best practice’.
Sources:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/sep/16/iraq.iraqtimeline
http://www.greenleft.org.au/2008/739/38228
http://www.opinion.co.uk/Newsroom_details.aspx?NewsId=88
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ORB_survey_of_casualties_of_the_Iraq_War
http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140673604174412/fulltext
