Death by Numbers in Iraq

There was some discussion last week on TIME's Swampland blog about Iraqi civilian casualties related to my recent article on the subject. The question many blog commentators were wondering was one of the most enduring of the Iraq war: How many have died? To start, there is no fully reliable count. Estimates have ranged from more than half a million on the high end to less than 100,000 as a low.

The high estimate comes from a widely disputed study published in the Lancet in October of 2006 that put the number of civilian casualties from 2003 to the summer of 2006 at 654,965. The findings flowed from a statistical survey and appeared as sectarian violence in Iraq was reaching a fever pitch, meaning thousands of other deaths were yet to be tallied. The low estimate, between 91,466 and 99,861, comes from Iraq Body Count and is considered a credible minimum.

The Associated Press ran a story today citing unreleased Iraqi government figures saying at least 87,215 people have been killed since 2005. The Associated Press, which tracks casualty figures with its own reporters and researchers, estimates that more than 110,000 Iraqi civilians have died since 2003, including those counted in the Iraqi government tally.

I think that number sounds low based on my experience looking into civilian casualty figures in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Balkans. For Iraq, the best civilian causality estimate I have seen comes from a study published in January of 2008 by the New England Journal of Medicine. That study, another statistical survey, estimated 151,000 deaths in Iraq in the period from March 2003 through June 2006, roughly the first three years of the war. I think you could safely double that figure to come up with a reasonable estimate covering the deaths from 2006 until now, since the New England Journal of Medicine survey did not cover the most violent years of the conflict here.

That means probably more than 300,000 Iraqi civilians have died through the course of the war so far. Meanwhile, at least another 148 Iraqis perished in the last 48 hours in a spate of fresh bombings.

However you look at the numbers, the figures are staggering, especially when considered as a portion of the Iraqi population, which is around 30 million. Take for example the number of just the missing in Iraq. Iraqi officials have told me that unpublished statistics of theirs show that at least 140,000 Iraqis have gone missing since 2003, with 82,000 documented cases in Baghdad alone. The real figure is likely much higher. Many Iraqis, particularly Sunnis, have been fearful of dealing with the predominately Shi'ite police because of their suspected ties to militia death squads blamed for much of the kidnapping and murder. So, undoubtedly many disappearances have gone unreported. But even the known disappearances add up to a sizable segment of the Iraqi population. In proportional terms, the mass disappearances in Iraq since 2003 would be roughly equal to seeing more than 800 people vanish daily from America's sixth largest city, Philadelphia, until it stood empty.