Casualties of the Iraq War

Casualties of the conflict in Iraq since 2003 (beginning with the 2003 invasion of Iraq and continuing with the ensuing 2003 occupation of Iraq coalition presence as well as the activities of the various armed groups operating in the country) have come in many forms, and the accuracy of the information available on different types of casualties varies greatly.

For troops in the U.S.-led multinational coalition, the death toll is carefully tracked and updated daily, and the names and photographs of those killed in action as well as in accidents have been published widely. Regarding the Iraqis, however, information on both military and civilian casualties is both less accurate and less reliable, and given the political significance of these figures and the varied agendas of all parties, no source can be considered free of bias. Estimates of casualty levels are available from reporters on the scene, from officials of involved organizations, and from groups that summarize information on incidents reported in the news media.

The word "casualties" in its most general sense includes the injured as well as the dead. Accounts of the number of coalition wounded vary widely, partly because it is not obvious what should be counted: should only those injuries serious enough to put a soldier out of commission be included? Do illnesses or injuries caused by accidents count, or should the focus be restricted to wounds caused by hostile engagement? Sources using different definitions may arrive at very different numbers, and sometimes the precise definition is not clearly specified. As for the Iraqis, where even the death toll has only been very roughly estimated, it appears that no one has attempted to count the wounded.

Overview

Casualties of the conflict in Iraq since 2003 (beginning with the 2003 invasion of Iraq and continuing with the ensuing 2003 occupation of Iraq coalition presence as well as the activities of the various armed groups operating in the country) have come in many forms, and the accuracy of the information available on different types of casualties varies greatly.

For troops in the U.S.-led multinational coalition, the death toll is carefully tracked and updated daily, and the names and photographs of those killed in action as well as in accidents have been published widely. Regarding the Iraqis, however, information on both military and civilian casualties is both less accurate and less reliable, and given the political significance of these figures and the varied agendas of all parties, no source can be considered free of bias. Estimates of casualty levels are available from reporters on the scene, from officials of involved organizations, and from groups that summarize information on incidents reported in the news media.

The word "casualties" in its most general sense includes the injured as well as the dead. Accounts of the number of coalition wounded vary widely, partly because it is not obvious what should be counted: should only those injuries serious enough to put a soldier out of commission be included? Do illnesses or injuries caused by accidents count, or should the focus be restricted to wounds caused by hostile engagement? Sources using different definitions may arrive at very different numbers, and sometimes the precise definition is not clearly specified. As for the Iraqis, where even the death toll has only been very roughly estimated, it appears that no one has attempted to count the wounded.

Additional statistics

Overview of casualties by type (see the rest of the article below for detailed explanations)

Dead

• Iraqis:

• Insurgents
  • See: List of Insurgents killed in Iraq for a partial list of insurgent deaths.
• Deadliest single insurgent attack:
  • Car bomb - Sadr City, Iraq (10 miles northeast of Baghdad) November 22, 2006.
    • 225 killed, 450 wounded

Wounded in action

• As of January 12, 2007, for Americans there are 500 major amputees due to the Iraq War. Toes and fingers aren't counted.
• As of September 30, 2006, 725 American troops have had limbs amputated from wounds received in Iraq and Afghanistan.
• A 2006 study by Walter Reed Medical Center, which serves more critically injured soldiers than most VA hospitals, concluded that 62 percent of patients there had suffered a brain injury.

Injured/fallen ill

• U.S. military: number unknown. The Pentagon reports that more than 1 in 4 returning U.S. soldiers have health problems that require medical or mental health treatment.
• Iraqi combatants: number unknown

Refugees

• As of November 4, 2006, the U.N. High Commissioner on Refugees estimated that 1.8 million Iraqis had been displaced to neighboring countries, and 1.6 million were displaced internally, with nearly 100,000 Iraqis fleeing to Syria and Jordan each month.

Contractor casualties

Their status as civilian is controversial. They are employees of U.S. government contractors and subcontractors, private military contractors, U.S. Department of Defense, etc.. The contractors come from many nations including Iraq and the USA.

However, the nation with the largest number of contractor deaths is the United States.

A February 23, 2007 Associated Press article reports that there are 120,000 contractors. It states that through the end of 2006 there have been 769 deaths and "3,367 injuries serious enough to require four or more days off the job."

A January 28, 2007 Houston Chronicle article reports that the Pentagon estimates around 100,000 contractors are currently in Iraq, and that the Pentagon does not track contractor deaths. The article reports: "Halliburton's KBR is the largest military contractor operating in Iraq, with more than 50,000 employees and subcontractors working there, as well as in Kuwait and Afghanistan."

The article reports from Labor Department information that more than 770 civilian contractors of U.S.-based companies in Iraq died between March 2003 and Dec. 31, 2006. 7,761 have been injured in Iraq. "How many of these civilian-contractor casualties were American citizens is unknown. Labor officials say they cannot provide a breakdown by nationality."

The article also reports:

The Labor Department has these numbers because it tracks workers' compensation claims by injured workers or families of slain contractors under the federal Defense Base Act. "Using employee time lost is a kind of a weird way to track casualties," Singer noted. "But it's part of the bizarre nature of this industry and the way it's been used in Iraq." Still, the Labor Department figures don't tell the full story.

An October 10, 2006 Reuters article reports, "Their number in Iraq is estimated at up to 100,000, from highly-trained former special forces soldiers to drivers, cooks, mechanics, plumbers, translators, electricians and laundry workers and other support personnel."

An April 2, 2004 Boston Globe article reports: "Just how much the growing security burden in Iraq is costing US taxpayers is hard to gauge because few reconstruction contracts are made public and there is no official estimate of how many security specialists are active there. Analysts estimate that corporations have some 30,000 to 40,000 workers in Iraq"

Concerning the number of security-related contractors an April 19, 2004 New York Times article states: "But more and more, they give the appearance of private, for-profit militias — by several estimates, a force of roughly 20,000 on top of an American military presence of 130,000.

That article also reports: "Sorting out lines of authority and communication can be complex. Many security guards are hired as 'independent contractors' by companies that, in turn, are sub-contractors of larger security companies, which are themselves subcontractors of a prime contractor, which may have been hired by a United States agency."

An April 13, 2004 Robert Fisk article reports: "At least 18 000 mercenaries, many of them tasked to protect US troops and personnel, are now believed to be in Iraq."

The article reported: "At least 80 foreign mercenaries - security guards recruited from the United States, Europe and South Africa and working for American companies - have been killed in the past eight days in Iraq." The article noted that this was more than the roughly 70 coalition troops who were killed in the same period.

Iraqi invasion casualties

Before the Iraq War, in March 2002 in Afghanistan at a news conference at Bagram Air Base, U.S. General Tommy Franks had famously said, "we don't do body counts."

File:IraqiKilledApr2003ByMarinesDefendingBridge.jpg

This Iraqi soldier was killed in April, 2003 by United States Marines.

General Tommy Franks reportedly estimated soon after the invasion that there had been 30,000 Iraqi casualties as of April 9, 2003. That number comes from the transcript of an October 2003 interview of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld by Bob Woodward. They were discussing a number reported by the Washington Post. But neither could remember the number clearly, nor whether it was just for deaths, or both deaths and wounded.

An October 20, 2003 study by the Project on Defense Alternatives at Commonwealth Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts (USA), stated that for March 19, 2003 to April 30, 2003, "Based on the analysis that follows we estimate that the 2003 Iraq war produced between 7,600 and 10,800 Iraqi combatant fatalities."

The study also stated: "Our analysis of the evidence leads to the conclusion that between 10,800 and 15,100 Iraqis were killed in the war. Of these, between 3,200 and 4,300 were noncombatants -- that is: civilians who did not take up arms."

The study explained that to arrive at these numbers, they had adjusted the underlying incident reports from the field by reducing each count by anywhere from 20% to 60%, based on their own reliability assessments, in order to "control for casualty inflation -- a prevalent form of bias."

The study author Carl Conetta reported: "All told, more than 40,000 Iraqis were killed or injured,"

The Iraq Body Count project documented a higher number of civilian deaths up to the end of the major combat phase (May 1, 2003). In a 2005 report using updated info the (IBC) reported that 7,299 civilians are documented to have been killed, primarily by US air and ground forces. There were 17,338 civilian injuries inflicted up to May 1, 2003. The IBC says their figures are likely underestimates because: "It is likely that many if not most civilian casualties will go unreported by the media."

A May 28, 2003 Guardian article reported "Extrapolating from the death-rates of between 3% and 10% found in the units around Baghdad, one reaches a toll of between 13,500 and 45,000 dead among troops and paramilitaries.

Iraqi Healthcare deterioration

A November 11, 2006 Los Angeles Times article reports:

The [Iraq] nation's health has deteriorated to a level not seen since the 1950s, said Joseph Chamie, former director of the U.N. Population Division and an Iraq specialist. "They were at the forefront", he said, referring to healthcare just before the 1991 Persian Gulf War. "Now they're looking more and more like a country in sub-Saharan Africa."

Most Iraqi children suffering from psychological symptoms

Seventy percent of children are suffering from trauma-related symptoms according to a study of 10,000 primary school students in the Shaab section of north Baghdad, conducted by the Iraqi Society of Psychiatrists and the World Health Organization. "We're now finding an elevation of mental health disorders in children -- emotional, conduct, peer, attention deficit," according to Iraqi psychiatrist Hashimi. "A number are even resulting in suicide."

Total Iraqi casualties

In 2007 D3 Systems [1] conducted a poll for BBC, ABC News, ARD German TV and USA Today. "More than 2,000 people were questioned in more than 450 neighbourhoods and villages across all 18 provinces of Iraq between 25 February and 5 March 2007. The margin of error is + or – 2.5%."

Question 35 asked: "Have you or an immediate family member - by which I mean someone living in this household – been physically harmed by the violence that is occurring in the country at this time?" 17% said yes, 83% said no.

The United Nations reported that 34,452 violent civilian deaths occurred in 2006, based on data from morgues, hospitals, and municipal authorities across Iraq.

For 2006, a January 2, 2007 Associated Press article reports: "The tabulation by the Iraqi ministries of Health, Defence and Interior, showed that 14,298 civilians, 1,348 police and 627 soldiers had been killed in the violence that raged across the country last year. The Associated Press figure, gleaned from daily news reports from Baghdad, arrived at a total of 13,738 deaths." The Australian reports in a January 2, 2007 article: "A figure of 3700 civilian deaths in October [2006], the latest tally given by the UN based on data from the Health Ministry and the Baghdad morgue, was branded exaggerated by the Iraqi Government." Iraqi government estimates include "people killed in bombings and shootings but not deaths classed as 'criminal'." Also, they "include no deaths among the many civilians wounded in attacks who may die later from wounds. Nor do they include many people kidnapped whose fate remains unknown."

A June 25, 2006 Los Angeles Times article, "War's Iraqi Death Toll Tops 50,000" , reported that their estimate of violent deaths consisted "mostly of civilians" but probably also included security forces and insurgents. It added that, "Many more Iraqis are believed to have been killed but not counted because of serious lapses in recording deaths in the chaotic first year after the invasion, when there was no functioning Iraqi government, and continued spotty reporting nationwide since." Here is how the Times got their number: "The Baghdad morgue received 30,204 bodies from 2003 through mid-2006, while the Health Ministry said it had documented 18,933 deaths from 'military clashes' and 'terrorist attacks' from April 5, 2004, to June 1, 2006. Together, the toll reaches 49,137. However, samples obtained from local health departments in other provinces show an undercount that brings the total well beyond 50,000. The figure also does not include deaths outside Baghdad in the first year of the invasion."

Another study was commissioned by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), called the Iraq Living Conditions Survey (ILCS), which sampled almost 22,000 households across all Iraqi provinces. It estimated 24,000 war-related violent deaths by May 2004 (with a 95 percent confidence interval from 18,000 to 29,000). This study also did not attempt to measure what portion of its estimate was made up of civilians. It would include Iraqi military killed during the invasion, as well as "insurgents" or other fighters thereafter . For more info see the section in Lancet surveys of mortality before and after the 2003 invasion of Iraq that compares the Lancet and UNDP ILCS studies.

2006 Excess Mortality Study

Main article: Lancet surveys of mortality before and after the 2003 invasion of Iraq

The October 2006 Lancet study estimated total excess deaths up to July 2006. Total deaths (civilian and non-civilian) include all additional deaths due to increased lawlessness, degraded infrastructure, poorer healthcare, etc.. The survey estimated 654,965 excess deaths related to the war. The 2006 study involved surveys between May 20 and July 10, 2006. More households were surveyed than during the 2004 study, allowing for a 95% confidence interval of 392,979 to 942,636 excess Iraqi deaths. The result was disputed by President Bush based both on the number of deaths and the methodology.

An October 12, 2006 San Francisco Chronicle article reported: "Asked at the news conference what he thinks the number is now, Bush said: 'I stand by the figure a lot of innocent people have lost their life.' At a separate Pentagon briefing, Gen. George Casey, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, said that the [Lancet] figure 'seems way, way beyond any number that I have seen. I've not seen a number higher than 50,000. And so I don't give it that much credibility at all'."

2004 Excess Mortality Study

Main article: Lancet surveys of mortality before and after the 2003 invasion of Iraq

The October 2004 Lancet study done by public health experts from Johns Hopkins University and published on 29 October 2004 in the Lancet medical journal, estimated that 100,000 "excess" Iraqi deaths from all causes had occurred since the US invasion began. The study did not attempt to measure how many of these were civilian, but the study's authors have said they believe that the "vast majority" were noncombatants, based on 7% of the casualties being women and 46% being children under the age of 15 (including Falluja data). To arrive at these excess death figures, a survey was taken from 988 Iraqi households in 33 clusters throughout Iraq, in which the residents were asked how many people lived there and how many births and deaths there had been since the war began. They then compared the death rate with the average from the 15 months before the war. Iraqis were found to be 1.5 times more likely to die from all causes after the invasion (rising from 0.5% to 0.79% per year) than in the 15 months preceding the war, producing an estimate of 98,000 excess deaths. This figure excluded data from one cluster in Falluja, which was deemed too much of an outlier for inclusion in the national estimate. If including data from Falluja, which showed a higher rate of violent deaths than the other 32 clusters combined, the increased death rate would be raised from 1.5 to 2.5 fold, violent deaths would be 58 times more likely with most of them due to air-strikes by coalition forces, and an additional 200,000 fatalities would be estimated.

The study contains the following Summary:

Background: In March, 2003, military forces, mainly from the USA and the UK, invaded Iraq. We did a survey to compare mortality during the period of 14.6 months before the invasion with the 17.8 months after it.

Methods: A cluster sample survey was undertaken throughout Iraq during September, 2004. 33 clusters of 30 households each were interviewed about household composition, births, and deaths since January, 2002. In those households reporting deaths, the date, cause, and circumstances of violent deaths were recorded. We assessed the relative risk of death associated with the 2003 invasion and occupation by comparing mortality in the 17.8 months after the invasion with the 14.6-month period preceding it.

Findings: The risk of death was estimated to be 2.5-fold (95% CI 1.6-4.2) higher after the invasion when compared with the preinvasion period. Two-thirds of all violent deaths were reported in one cluster in the city of Falluja. If we exclude the Falluja data, the risk of death is 1.5-fold (1.1-2.3) higher after the invasion. We estimate that 98,000 more deaths than expected (8000-194,000) happened after the invasion outside of Falluja and far more if the outlier Falluja cluster is included. The major causes of death before the invasion were myocardial infarction, cerebrovascular accidents, and other chronic disorders whereas after the invasion violence was the primary cause of death. Violent deaths were widespread, reported in 15 of 33 clusters, and were mainly attributed to coalition forces. Most individuals reportedly killed by coalition forces were men. The risk of death from violence in the period after the invasion was 58 times higher (95% CI 8.1-419) than in the period before the war.

Interpretation: Making conservative assumptions, we think that about 100,000 excess deaths, or more have happened since the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Violence accounted for most of the excess deaths and air strikes from coalition forces accounted for most violent deaths. We have shown that collection of public-health information is possible even during periods of extreme violence. Our results need further verification and should lead to changes to reduce noncombatant deaths from air strikes.

See Lancet study for more details of the methodology and subsequent controversy about the study.

Iraqi civilian casualties

Iraqi civilians have suffered the bulk of fatalities in this conflict. Estimates of the number of civilian deaths are better documented than the estimates of Iraqi military casualties, but they still reveal significant uncertainty.

An independent UK/US group, the Iraq Body Count project (IBC), compiles reported Iraqi civilian deaths resulting from the invasion and occupation, including those caused directly by coalition military action, those caused directly by the Iraqi insurgency, and those resulting from excess crime (the Iraqi Body Count project claims that the Occupying Authority is responsible to prevent these deaths under international law). It shows a minimum of 53,040 and a maximum of 58,643 as of 7 January, 2007. In its "Quick-FAQ" the IBC states: "It is likely that many if not most civilian casualties will go unreported by the media. That is the sad nature of war."

For the week ending Dec. 31, 2006 the IBC reports : "It was a truly violent year, as around 24,000 civilians lost their lives in Iraq. This was a massive rise in violence: 14,000 had been killed in 2005, 10,500 in 2004 and just under 12,000 in 2003 (7,000 of them killed during the actual war, while only 5,000 killed during the ‘peace’ that followed in May 2003). In December 2006 alone around 2,800 civilians were reported killed. This week there were over 560 civilian deaths reported."

From the above quote here are the IBC yearly death totals:

• 2003: 12,000 (5,000 if excluding the invasion)
• 2004: 10,500
• 2005: 14,000
• 2006: 24,000

The IBC released a report detailing the deaths it recorded between March 2003 and March 2005 in which it recorded 24,865 civilian deaths. The report says the US and its allies were responsible for the largest share (37%) of the 24,865 deaths. The remaining deaths were attributed to anti-occupations forces (9%), crime (36%) and unknown agents (11%). It also lists the primary sources used by the media: mortuaries, medics, Iraqi officials, eyewitnesses, police, relatives, US-Coalition, journalists, NGOs, friends/Associates, other.

Another study by an Iraqi political party, the "People's Kifah, or Struggle Against Hegemony," reported the findings of a survey it conducted between March and June of 2003 throughout the non-Kurdish areas of Iraq. They tallied 36,533 civilians killed in those areas by June 2003. Information on this study was first published on the website of retired Wall Street Journal reporter Jude Wanniski in August of 2003. While detailed town-by-town totals are given by the PK spokesperson, details of methodology are very thin and raw data is not in the public domain. A still less detailed report on this study appeared some months later in Al Jazeerah. The Al Jazeera report claims the study covered up to October 2003, but this can not be accurate, as the exact same figures were already published on the Wanniski website in August of 2003.

Note that both groups above (IBC and PK) define the word civilian to exclude the various paramilitary forces operating in Iraq as well as the official military forces that existed under Saddam Hussein's regime.

As for the major combat phase of the war from March–April 2003, Abu Dhabi TV reported on April 8, 2003 that Iraqi sources had claimed that 1,252 civilians had been killed and 5,103 had been wounded. The Iraq Body Count project, incorporating subsequent reports, has reported that by the end of the major combat phase up to April 30, 2003, 7,299 civilians had been killed, primarily by US air and ground forces.

Iraqi refugees crisis

As of 2007 more Iraqis have lost their homes and become refugees than the population of any other country. Over 3.9 million people, close to 16% of the Iraqi population, have become uprooted. Of these, around 2 million have fled Iraq and flooded other countries, and 1.9 million are estimated to be refugees inside Iraq.

Iraqi insurgent casualties

There is a partial list of insurgents and militia members killed in the Iraq War according to a few published news sources. According to the list at least 8,000 insurgents have been killed during the war. See: List of Insurgents killed in Iraq.

Insurgent deaths, like civilian deaths, are hard to count or estimate. See: . See also the examples of undercounting shown in the next section.

Some claims are difficult to verify. For example; the claim by an Al Qaeda leader that 4000 foreign insurgents have been killed in the war. See this Sept. 28, 2006 Associated Press article:

The Lancet surveys did not ask whether the dead were combatants or not.

Undercounting

Most studies estimating the casualties due to the war in Iraq acknowledge various reasons why the estimates and counts may be low.

The October 2006 Lancet study states: "Aside from Bosnia, we can find no conflict situation where passive surveillance [used by the IBC] recorded more than 20% of the deaths measured by population-based methods [used in the Lancet studies]. In several outbreaks, disease and death recorded by facility-based methods underestimated events by a factor of ten or more when compared with population-based estimates. Between 1960 and 1990, newspaper accounts of political deaths in Guatemala correctly reported over 50% of deaths in years of low violence but less than 5% in years of highest violence." The report describes no other specific examples except for this study of Guatemala.

The Lancet reference used is to Patrick Ball, Paul Kobrak, and Herbert F. Spirer and their 1999 book, State Violence in Guatemala, 1960-1996: A Quantitative Reflection . From the introduction:

"The CIIDH database consists of cases culled from direct testimonies and documentary and press sources."

They report in chapter 7 :

"Figure 7.1 shows that in the CIIDH database, most of the information for human rights violations prior to 1977 comes from press sources. ... Approximately 10,890 cases were coded from the newspapers. Sixty-three percent of the press cases were taken from Prensa Libre, 10 percent from El Gráfico, 8 percent from La Hora and El Impacto respectively, and 6 percent from El Imparcial. The remaining 5 percent is made up by eight other newspapers."

But they reported that in later, more violent years:

"When the level of violence increased dramatically in the late 1970s and early 1980s, numbers of reported violations in the press stayed very low. In 1981, one of the worst years of state violence, the numbers fall towards zero. The press reported almost none of the rural violence."

There is a list of figures, tables, and charts in the book that can be used to calculate what percentage of the deaths were reported by the 13 Guatemalan newspapers for each year when compared to testimonies of witnesses compiled by popular organizations.

A July 28, 2004 article by The Independent reports that "some families bury their dead without notifying the authorities."

Stephen Soldz, who runs the website "Iraq Occupation and Resistance Report", wrote in a February 5, 2006 article : "Of course, in conditions of active rebellion, the safer areas accessible to Western reporters are likely to be those under US/Coalition control, where deaths are, in turn, likely to be due to insurgent attacks. Areas of insurgent control, which are likely to be subject to US and Iraqi government attack, for example most of Anbar province, are simply off-limits to these reporters. Thus, the realities of reporting imply that reporters will be witness to a larger fraction of deaths due to insurgents and a lesser proportion of deaths due to US and Iraqi government forces."

A June 25, 2006 Los Angeles Times article reports: "Many more Iraqis are believed to have been killed but not counted because of serious lapses in recording deaths. ... The [Los Angeles] Times attempted to reach a comprehensive figure by obtaining statistics from the Baghdad morgue and the Health Ministry and checking those numbers against a sampling of local health departments for possible undercounts."

An October 19, 2006 Washington Post article reports: "The deaths reported by officials and published in the news media represent only a fraction of the thousands of mutilated bodies winding up in Baghdad's overcrowded morgue each month. ... Bodies are increasingly being dumped in and around Baghdad in fields staked out by individual Shiite militias and Sunni insurgent groups. Iraqi security forces often refuse to go to the dumping grounds, leaving the precise number of bodies in those sites unknown. Civilian deaths, unlike those of American troops, often go unrecorded."

The Australian reports in a January 2, 2007 article that Iraqi government casualty estimates include "people killed in bombings and shootings but not deaths classed as 'criminal'." Also, they "include no deaths among the many civilians wounded in attacks who may die later from wounds. Nor do they include many people kidnapped whose fate remains unknown."

In a November 7, 2004 press release concerning the October 2004 Lancet study the Iraq Body Count project (IBC) states: "We have always been quite explicit that our own total is certain to be an underestimate of the true position, because of gaps in reporting or recording".

One of the sources used by the media are morgues. Only the central Baghdad area morgue has released figures consistently. While that is the largest morgue in Iraq and in the most consistently violent area, the absence of comprehensive morgue figures elsewhere leads to undercounting. IBC makes it clear that, due to these issues, its count will almost certainly be below the full toll in its 'Quick FAQ' on its homepage.

Quote from an IBC note : "The Iraq Body Count (IBC) estimate for x350, like that for x334, was made possible by examination of the detailed data supplied to the Associated Press (AP) by the morgues surveyed in AP's 23rd May 2004 survey of Iraqi morgues."

That May 23, 2004 Associated Press article points out the lack of morgue data from many areas of Iraq. Also, it states: "The [Baghdad] figure does not include most people killed in big terrorist bombings, Hassan said. The cause of death in such cases is obvious so bodies are usually not taken to the morgue, but given directly to victims' families. Also, the bodies of killed fighters from groups like the al-Mahdi Army are rarely taken to morgues."

Systematic underreporting by U.S.

An April 2005 article by The Independent reports:

"A week before she was killed by a suicide bomber, humanitarian worker Marla Ruzicka forced military commanders to admit they did keep records of Iraqi civilians killed by US forces. ... in an essay Ms Ruzicka wrote a week before her death on Saturday and published yesterday, the 28-year-old revealed that a Brigadier General told her it was 'standard operating procedure' for US troops to file a report when they shoot a non-combatant. She obtained figures for the number of civilians killed in Baghdad between 28 February and 5 April [2005], and discovered that 29 had been killed in firefights involving US forces and insurgents. This was four times the number of Iraqi police killed."

The December 2006 report of the Iraq Study Group (ISG) found that the United States has filtered out reports of violence in order to disguise its policy failings in Iraq . A December 7, 2006 McClatchy Newspapers article reports that the ISG found that U.S. officials reported 93 attacks or significant acts of violence on one day in July 2006, yet "a careful review of the reports for that single day brought to light more than 1,100 acts of violence." The article further reports:

"The finding confirmed a Sept. 8 McClatchy Newspapers report that U.S. officials excluded scores of people killed in car bombings and mortar attacks from tabulations measuring the results of a drive to reduce violence in Baghdad. By excluding that data, U.S. officials were able to boast that deaths from sectarian violence in the Iraqi capital had declined by more than 52 percent between July and August, McClatchy newspapers reported."

From the ISG report itself: "A murder of an Iraqi is not necessarily counted as an attack. If we cannot determine the source of a sectarian attack, that assault does not make it into the database. A roadside bomb or a rocket or mortar attack that doesn't hurt U.S. personnel doesn't count."

Casualties caused by criminal and political violence

In May 2004, the Associated Press completed a survey of the morgues in Baghdad and surrounding provinces, to tally violent deaths since President Bush declared an end to major combat operations on May 1, 2003. The survey covered through April 30, 2004. In that 12 month period in Baghdad alone, they counted 4,279 such deaths in a city of 5.6 million. This is an average of 357 killings per month in Baghdad. The figure excludes trauma deaths such as car accidents, falls, etc.. The article reports that this translates to 76 killings per 100,000 people, compared to 39 in crime-ridden Bogotá, Colombia, 7.5 in New York City, and 2.4 in neighboring Jordan. The article states that there were 14 killings per month in 2002 in Baghdad. That translates to 3.0 killings per 100,000 people in Baghdad itself in 2002 (the year before the war).

Morgues surveyed in other parts of Iraq also reported large increases in the homicide rate. For example, the rate in the province of Karbala, south of Baghdad, rose from an average of one homicide per month in 2002 to an average of 55 per month in the year following the invasion; in Tikrit, north of Baghdad, where there were no homicides in 2002, the rate had grown to an average of 17 per month; in the northern province of Kirkuk, the rate had increased from 3 per month in 2002 to 34 per month in the survey period.

From the AP article:

In Baghdad, a city of about 5.6 million, 4,279 people were recorded killed in the 12 months through April 30 [2004], according to figures provided by Kais Hassan, director of statistics at Baghdad's Medicolegal Institute, which administers the city's morgues. "Before the war, there was a strong government, strong security. There were a lot of police on the streets and there were no illegal weapons," he said during an AP reporter's visit to the morgue. "Now there are few controls. There is crime, revenge killings, so much violence." The figure does not include most people killed in big terrorist bombings, Hassan said. The cause of death in such cases is obvious so bodies are usually not taken to the morgue, but given directly to victims' families. Also, the bodies of killed fighters from groups like the al-Mahdi Army are rarely taken to morgues.

Non-Iraqi civilian casualties

Many non-combatants from both coalition and non-coalition countries have also been killed or wounded, including journalists and international aid personnel and foreign civilians. See the main overview chart at the top for numbers and more info.

Coalition military casualties

Most U.S. casualties, like these in a C-17, return to Dover AFB. The Pentagon has been reluctant to release photos of caskets but was forced due to the Freedom of Information Act.

For the latest casualty numbers see the overview chart at the top of the page. See also the icasualties.org site:

Since the official handover of power to the Iraq interim government on June 28, 2004, coalition soldiers have continued to come under attack in towns across Iraq.

National Public Radio has a month-by-month chart of American troops killed in the Iraq War.

The combined total of coalition and contractor casualties in the conflict is now over ten times that of the 1990-1991 Gulf War. In the Gulf War, coalition forces suffered around 378 deaths, and among the Iraqi military, tens of thousands were killed, along with thousands of civilians.

Troops fallen ill, injured, or wounded

See the overview chart at the top of the page for recent numbers.

On August 29, 2006 the Christian Science Monitor reported : "Because of new body armor and advances in military medicine, for example, the ratio of combat-zone deaths to those wounded has dropped from 24 percent in Vietnam to 13 percent in Iraq and Afghanistan. In other words, the numbers of those killed as a percentage of overall casualties is lower."

Many U.S. veterans of the Iraq War have reported a range of serious health issues, including tumors, daily blood in urine and stool, sexual dysfunction, migraines, frequent muscle spasms, and other symptoms similar to the debilitating symptoms of "Gulf War Syndrome" reported by many veterans of the 1991 Gulf War, which some believe is related to the United States' use of radioactive depleted uranium .

A study of U.S. veterans published in July 2004 in the The New England Journal of Medicine on posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and other mental disorders in Iraq and Afghanistan veterans found that 5 to 9.4% (depending on the strictness of the PTSD definition used) suffered from PTSD before deployment. After deployment 6.2 to 19.9% suffered from PTSD. For the broad definition of PTSD that represents an increase of 10.5% (19.9 - 9.4% = 10.5%). That is 10,500 additional cases of PTSD for every 100,000 U.S. troops after they have served in Iraq. ePluribus Media, an independent citizen journalism collective, is tracking and cataloging press-reported possible, probable, or confirmed incidents of post-deployment or combat-zone cases in its PTSD Timeline.

Information on injuries suffered by troops of other coalition countries is less readily available, but a statement in Hansard indicated that 2,703 UK soldiers had been medically evacuated from Iraq for wounds or injuries as of October 4, 2004 and that 155 UK troops were wounded in combat in the initial invasion .

Nightline controversy

Map showing U.S. casualty numbers by state

Ted Koppel, host of ABC's Nightline, devoted his entire show on April 30, 2004, to reading the names of 721 of the 737 U.S. troops who had died thus far. He did not mention deaths in Afghanistan. (The show hadn't been able to confirm the remaining 16 names.)

Claiming that this would constitute a political statement, the Sinclair Broadcast Group, a media company whose executives have strongly supported President Bush, took the unusual action of barring the seven ABC-affiliated stations it controls from airing the show. The decision to censor the broadcast drew criticism from both sides, including members of the armed forces, opponents of the war, MoveOn.org, and most notably Republican Senator John McCain, who denounced the move as "unpatriotic" and "a gross disservice to the public"

Dec. 25, 2006. U.S. military death total equals 9/11 death toll.

Many newspapers reported that on Christmas day, December 25, 2006 the total number of U.S. military deaths from the Iraq War equaled and surpassed the 2973 total deaths on 9/11 (not counting the 19 suicide hijackers). For example; a Dec. 27, 2006 Newsday article reported:

"A Christmas Day explosion pushed the number of American troops killed in Iraq above the Sept. 11, 2001, death toll. ... The bomb explosion Monday, which killed two soldiers south of Baghdad, raised the number of troops killed to 2,974 since the beginning of the Iraq war in 2003, according to a count by The Associated Press. Terrorists hijacked jetliners on Sept. 11, 2001, and crashed them into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field, killing 2,973 people."

Amputees

As of January 18, 2007, there were at least 500 American amputees due to the Iraq War. According to a Time magazine article, the 500th victim was a 24-year-old corporal, who lost both legs in a roadside bomb explosion on January 12, 2007. He was cared for at the military hospital in Landstuhl, Germany, and then was transferred to Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

The article reports: "The 500 major amputations — toes and fingers aren't counted — represent 2.2% of the 22,700 U.S. troops wounded in action. But the number rises to 5% in the category of soldiers whose wounds prevent them returning to duty."

Traumatic brain injuries (TBI)

A Feb. 2007 article by Discover magazine, titled "Dead Men Walking. What sort of future do brain-injured Iraq veterans face?", reports: "One expert from the VA estimates the number of undiagnosed TBIs at over 7,500. Nearly 2,000 brain-injured soldiers have already received some level of care, ..."

Mental Illness

A March 12, 2007 Time magazine article reports on a study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine. About one third of the 103,788 veterans returning from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars seen at Veterans Affairs facilities between September 30, 2001 and September 30, 2005 were diagnosed with mental illness or a psycho-social disorder, such as homelessness and marital problems, including domestic violence. More than half of those diagnosed, 56%, were suffering from more than one disorder. The most common combination was post-traumatic stress disorder and depression.

See also

• United States casualties of war
• Post-traumatic stress disorder
• Suicide bombings in Iraq since 2003
• Lancet surveys of mortality before and after the 2003 invasion of Iraq
• Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict
• Iraq Body Count project
• List of Coalition forces killed in Iraq in 2006
• Violence against academics in post-invasion Iraq

External links and references

(Additional links not found in the 2 reference sections higher up.)

U.S. military casualties only

• "Faces of the Fallen", Washington Post database of all U.S. service-member casualties from Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) and Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF)
• Statistical Summary: America's Major Wars (does not include Iraq War), cwc.lsu.edu
• "A Look At Those Who Died in Iraq", New York Times interactive
• U.S. Military Casualties, United States Department of Defense
• Timeline: US losses in Iraq since 1 May 2003, BBC News, last updated 5 May 2004
• "Honor the Fallen", database of U.S. troops killed in OIF and OEF
• "US Military Personnel Wounded in Iraq & Afghanistan: A Running Log", last updated 18 December 2003
• "U.S. Military Deaths in Bush's Iraq Quagmire", chart
• U.S. deaths in Vietnam and Iraq, comparative graph of casualties from beginning of conflicts, www.lies.com
• U.S. Casualties in Iraq, globalsecurity.org

Coalition (including U.S. and contractors) casualties only

• "Iraq War Coalition Fatalities", Flash graphic of Iraq map showing Coalition casualties over time with location, obleek.com

Iraqi casualties only

• Les Roberts seminar at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, on 13 April 2005; uploaded in http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5vD_Ub2K_c on 25 October 2006.
• BBC Quick guide: Violence in Iraq November 2006

General and miscellaneous

• "Wage Peace Movie", 2-minute web movie about casualties in Iraq from the American Friends Service Committee
• "Eyes Wide Open", a travelling exhibition on the human cost of war
• "Casualties of the War in Iraq", link and news aggregator, purposeless.com
• "Iraq: Journalists in Danger - A statistical profile of journalists killed on duty since March 2003 in Iraq", Committee to Protect Journalists
• "Likely Humanitarian Scenarios", UN internal memo predicting 100,000 direct and 400,000 indirect casualties as a result of the invasion, 10 December 2002

Additional statistics

Overview of casualties by type (see the rest of the article below for detailed explanations)

Dead

• Iraqis:

• Insurgents
  • See: List of Insurgents killed in Iraq for a partial list of insurgent deaths.
• Deadliest single insurgent attack:
  • Car bomb - Sadr City, Iraq (10 miles northeast of Baghdad) November 22, 2006.
    • 225 killed, 450 wounded

Wounded in action

• As of January 12, 2007, for Americans there are 500 major amputees due to the Iraq War. Toes and fingers aren't counted.
• As of September 30, 2006, 725 American troops have had limbs amputated from wounds received in Iraq and Afghanistan.
• A 2006 study by Walter Reed Medical Center, which serves more critically injured soldiers than most VA hospitals, concluded that 62 percent of patients there had suffered a brain injury.

Injured/fallen ill

• U.S. military: number unknown. The Pentagon reports that more than 1 in 4 returning U.S. soldiers have health problems that require medical or mental health treatment.
• Iraqi combatants: number unknown

Refugees

• As of November 4, 2006, the U.N. High Commissioner on Refugees estimated that 1.8 million Iraqis had been displaced to neighboring countries, and 1.6 million were displaced internally, with nearly 100,000 Iraqis fleeing to Syria and Jordan each month.

Contractor casualties

Their status as civilian is controversial. They are employees of U.S. government contractors and subcontractors, private military contractors, U.S. Department of Defense, etc.. The contractors come from many nations including Iraq and the USA.

However, the nation with the largest number of contractor deaths is the United States.

A February 23, 2007 Associated Press article reports that there are 120,000 contractors. It states that through the end of 2006 there have been 769 deaths and "3,367 injuries serious enough to require four or more days off the job."

A January 28, 2007 Houston Chronicle article reports that the Pentagon estimates around 100,000 contractors are currently in Iraq, and that the Pentagon does not track contractor deaths. The article reports: "Halliburton's KBR is the largest military contractor operating in Iraq, with more than 50,000 employees and subcontractors working there, as well as in Kuwait and Afghanistan."

The article reports from Labor Department information that more than 770 civilian contractors of U.S.-based companies in Iraq died between March 2003 and Dec. 31, 2006. 7,761 have been injured in Iraq. "How many of these civilian-contractor casualties were American citizens is unknown. Labor officials say they cannot provide a breakdown by nationality."

The article also reports:

The Labor Department has these numbers because it tracks workers' compensation claims by injured workers or families of slain contractors under the federal Defense Base Act. "Using employee time lost is a kind of a weird way to track casualties," Singer noted. "But it's part of the bizarre nature of this industry and the way it's been used in Iraq." Still, the Labor Department figures don't tell the full story.

An October 10, 2006 Reuters article reports, "Their number in Iraq is estimated at up to 100,000, from highly-trained former special forces soldiers to drivers, cooks, mechanics, plumbers, translators, electricians and laundry workers and other support personnel."

An April 2, 2004 Boston Globe article reports: "Just how much the growing security burden in Iraq is costing US taxpayers is hard to gauge because few reconstruction contracts are made public and there is no official estimate of how many security specialists are active there. Analysts estimate that corporations have some 30,000 to 40,000 workers in Iraq"

Concerning the number of security-related contractors an April 19, 2004 New York Times article states: "But more and more, they give the appearance of private, for-profit militias — by several estimates, a force of roughly 20,000 on top of an American military presence of 130,000.

That article also reports: "Sorting out lines of authority and communication can be complex. Many security guards are hired as 'independent contractors' by companies that, in turn, are sub-contractors of larger security companies, which are themselves subcontractors of a prime contractor, which may have been hired by a United States agency."

An April 13, 2004 Robert Fisk article reports: "At least 18 000 mercenaries, many of them tasked to protect US troops and personnel, are now believed to be in Iraq."

The article reported: "At least 80 foreign mercenaries - security guards recruited from the United States, Europe and South Africa and working for American companies - have been killed in the past eight days in Iraq." The article noted that this was more than the roughly 70 coalition troops who were killed in the same period.

Iraqi invasion casualties

Before the Iraq War, in March 2002 in Afghanistan at a news conference at Bagram Air Base, U.S. General Tommy Franks had famously said, "we don't do body counts."

File:IraqiKilledApr2003ByMarinesDefendingBridge.jpg

This Iraqi soldier was killed in April, 2003 by United States Marines.

General Tommy Franks reportedly estimated soon after the invasion that there had been 30,000 Iraqi casualties as of April 9, 2003. That number comes from the transcript of an October 2003 interview of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld by Bob Woodward. They were discussing a number reported by the Washington Post. But neither could remember the number clearly, nor whether it was just for deaths, or both deaths and wounded.

An October 20, 2003 study by the Project on Defense Alternatives at Commonwealth Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts (USA), stated that for March 19, 2003 to April 30, 2003, "Based on the analysis that follows we estimate that the 2003 Iraq war produced between 7,600 and 10,800 Iraqi combatant fatalities."

The study also stated: "Our analysis of the evidence leads to the conclusion that between 10,800 and 15,100 Iraqis were killed in the war. Of these, between 3,200 and 4,300 were noncombatants -- that is: civilians who did not take up arms."

The study explained that to arrive at these numbers, they had adjusted the underlying incident reports from the field by reducing each count by anywhere from 20% to 60%, based on their own reliability assessments, in order to "control for casualty inflation -- a prevalent form of bias."

The study author Carl Conetta reported: "All told, more than 40,000 Iraqis were killed or injured,"

The Iraq Body Count project documented a higher number of civilian deaths up to the end of the major combat phase (May 1, 2003). In a 2005 report using updated info the (IBC) reported that 7,299 civilians are documented to have been killed, primarily by US air and ground forces. There were 17,338 civilian injuries inflicted up to May 1, 2003. The IBC says their figures are likely underestimates because: "It is likely that many if not most civilian casualties will go unreported by the media."

A May 28, 2003 Guardian article reported "Extrapolating from the death-rates of between 3% and 10% found in the units around Baghdad, one reaches a toll of between 13,500 and 45,000 dead among troops and paramilitaries.

Iraqi Healthcare deterioration

A November 11, 2006 Los Angeles Times article reports:

The [Iraq] nation's health has deteriorated to a level not seen since the 1950s, said Joseph Chamie, former director of the U.N. Population Division and an Iraq specialist. "They were at the forefront", he said, referring to healthcare just before the 1991 Persian Gulf War. "Now they're looking more and more like a country in sub-Saharan Africa."

Most Iraqi children suffering from psychological symptoms

Seventy percent of children are suffering from trauma-related symptoms according to a study of 10,000 primary school students in the Shaab section of north Baghdad, conducted by the Iraqi Society of Psychiatrists and the World Health Organization. "We're now finding an elevation of mental health disorders in children -- emotional, conduct, peer, attention deficit," according to Iraqi psychiatrist Hashimi. "A number are even resulting in suicide."

Total Iraqi casualties

In 2007 D3 Systems [2] conducted a poll for BBC, ABC News, ARD German TV and USA Today. "More than 2,000 people were questioned in more than 450 neighbourhoods and villages across all 18 provinces of Iraq between 25 February and 5 March 2007. The margin of error is + or – 2.5%."

Question 35 asked: "Have you or an immediate family member - by which I mean someone living in this household – been physically harmed by the violence that is occurring in the country at this time?" 17% said yes, 83% said no.

The United Nations reported that 34,452 violent civilian deaths occurred in 2006, based on data from morgues, hospitals, and municipal authorities across Iraq.

For 2006, a January 2, 2007 Associated Press article reports: "The tabulation by the Iraqi ministries of Health, Defence and Interior, showed that 14,298 civilians, 1,348 police and 627 soldiers had been killed in the violence that raged across the country last year. The Associated Press figure, gleaned from daily news reports from Baghdad, arrived at a total of 13,738 deaths." The Australian reports in a January 2, 2007 article: "A figure of 3700 civilian deaths in October [2006], the latest tally given by the UN based on data from the Health Ministry and the Baghdad morgue, was branded exaggerated by the Iraqi Government." Iraqi government estimates include "people killed in bombings and shootings but not deaths classed as 'criminal'." Also, they "include no deaths among the many civilians wounded in attacks who may die later from wounds. Nor do they include many people kidnapped whose fate remains unknown."

A June 25, 2006 Los Angeles Times article, "War's Iraqi Death Toll Tops 50,000" , reported that their estimate of violent deaths consisted "mostly of civilians" but probably also included security forces and insurgents. It added that, "Many more Iraqis are believed to have been killed but not counted because of serious lapses in recording deaths in the chaotic first year after the invasion, when there was no functioning Iraqi government, and continued spotty reporting nationwide since." Here is how the Times got their number: "The Baghdad morgue received 30,204 bodies from 2003 through mid-2006, while the Health Ministry said it had documented 18,933 deaths from 'military clashes' and 'terrorist attacks' from April 5, 2004, to June 1, 2006. Together, the toll reaches 49,137. However, samples obtained from local health departments in other provinces show an undercount that brings the total well beyond 50,000. The figure also does not include deaths outside Baghdad in the first year of the invasion."

Another study was commissioned by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), called the Iraq Living Conditions Survey (ILCS), which sampled almost 22,000 households across all Iraqi provinces. It estimated 24,000 war-related violent deaths by May 2004 (with a 95 percent confidence interval from 18,000 to 29,000). This study also did not attempt to measure what portion of its estimate was made up of civilians. It would include Iraqi military killed during the invasion, as well as "insurgents" or other fighters thereafter . For more info see the section in Lancet surveys of mortality before and after the 2003 invasion of Iraq that compares the Lancet and UNDP ILCS studies.

2006 Excess Mortality Study

Main article: Lancet surveys of mortality before and after the 2003 invasion of Iraq

The October 2006 Lancet study estimated total excess deaths up to July 2006. Total deaths (civilian and non-civilian) include all additional deaths due to increased lawlessness, degraded infrastructure, poorer healthcare, etc.. The survey estimated 654,965 excess deaths related to the war. The 2006 study involved surveys between May 20 and July 10, 2006. More households were surveyed than during the 2004 study, allowing for a 95% confidence interval of 392,979 to 942,636 excess Iraqi deaths. The result was disputed by President Bush based both on the number of deaths and the methodology.

An October 12, 2006 San Francisco Chronicle article reported: "Asked at the news conference what he thinks the number is now, Bush said: 'I stand by the figure a lot of innocent people have lost their life.' At a separate Pentagon briefing, Gen. George Casey, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, said that the [Lancet] figure 'seems way, way beyond any number that I have seen. I've not seen a number higher than 50,000. And so I don't give it that much credibility at all'."

2004 Excess Mortality Study

Main article: Lancet surveys of mortality before and after the 2003 invasion of Iraq

The October 2004 Lancet study done by public health experts from Johns Hopkins University and published on 29 October 2004 in the Lancet medical journal, estimated that 100,000 "excess" Iraqi deaths from all causes had occurred since the US invasion began. The study did not attempt to measure how many of these were civilian, but the study's authors have said they believe that the "vast majority" were noncombatants, based on 7% of the casualties being women and 46% being children under the age of 15 (including Falluja data). To arrive at these excess death figures, a survey was taken from 988 Iraqi households in 33 clusters throughout Iraq, in which the residents were asked how many people lived there and how many births and deaths there had been since the war began. They then compared the death rate with the average from the 15 months before the war. Iraqis were found to be 1.5 times more likely to die from all causes after the invasion (rising from 0.5% to 0.79% per year) than in the 15 months preceding the war, producing an estimate of 98,000 excess deaths. This figure excluded data from one cluster in Falluja, which was deemed too much of an outlier for inclusion in the national estimate. If including data from Falluja, which showed a higher rate of violent deaths than the other 32 clusters combined, the increased death rate would be raised from 1.5 to 2.5 fold, violent deaths would be 58 times more likely with most of them due to air-strikes by coalition forces, and an additional 200,000 fatalities would be estimated.

The study contains the following Summary:

Background: In March, 2003, military forces, mainly from the USA and the UK, invaded Iraq. We did a survey to compare mortality during the period of 14.6 months before the invasion with the 17.8 months after it.

Methods: A cluster sample survey was undertaken throughout Iraq during September, 2004. 33 clusters of 30 households each were interviewed about household composition, births, and deaths since January, 2002. In those households reporting deaths, the date, cause, and circumstances of violent deaths were recorded. We assessed the relative risk of death associated with the 2003 invasion and occupation by comparing mortality in the 17.8 months after the invasion with the 14.6-month period preceding it.

Findings: The risk of death was estimated to be 2.5-fold (95% CI 1.6-4.2) higher after the invasion when compared with the preinvasion period. Two-thirds of all violent deaths were reported in one cluster in the city of Falluja. If we exclude the Falluja data, the risk of death is 1.5-fold (1.1-2.3) higher after the invasion. We estimate that 98,000 more deaths than expected (8000-194,000) happened after the invasion outside of Falluja and far more if the outlier Falluja cluster is included. The major causes of death before the invasion were myocardial infarction, cerebrovascular accidents, and other chronic disorders whereas after the invasion violence was the primary cause of death. Violent deaths were widespread, reported in 15 of 33 clusters, and were mainly attributed to coalition forces. Most individuals reportedly killed by coalition forces were men. The risk of death from violence in the period after the invasion was 58 times higher (95% CI 8.1-419) than in the period before the war.

Interpretation: Making conservative assumptions, we think that about 100,000 excess deaths, or more have happened since the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Violence accounted for most of the excess deaths and air strikes from coalition forces accounted for most violent deaths. We have shown that collection of public-health information is possible even during periods of extreme violence. Our results need further verification and should lead to changes to reduce noncombatant deaths from air strikes.

See Lancet study for more details of the methodology and subsequent controversy about the study.

Iraqi civilian casualties

Iraqi civilians have suffered the bulk of fatalities in this conflict. Estimates of the number of civilian deaths are better documented than the estimates of Iraqi military casualties, but they still reveal significant uncertainty.

An independent UK/US group, the Iraq Body Count project (IBC), compiles reported Iraqi civilian deaths resulting from the invasion and occupation, including those caused directly by coalition military action, those caused directly by the Iraqi insurgency, and those resulting from excess crime (the Iraqi Body Count project claims that the Occupying Authority is responsible to prevent these deaths under international law). It shows a minimum of 53,040 and a maximum of 58,643 as of 7 January, 2007. In its "Quick-FAQ" the IBC states: "It is likely that many if not most civilian casualties will go unreported by the media. That is the sad nature of war."

For the week ending Dec. 31, 2006 the IBC reports : "It was a truly violent year, as around 24,000 civilians lost their lives in Iraq. This was a massive rise in violence: 14,000 had been killed in 2005, 10,500 in 2004 and just under 12,000 in 2003 (7,000 of them killed during the actual war, while only 5,000 killed during the ‘peace’ that followed in May 2003). In December 2006 alone around 2,800 civilians were reported killed. This week there were over 560 civilian deaths reported."

From the above quote here are the IBC yearly death totals:

• 2003: 12,000 (5,000 if excluding the invasion)
• 2004: 10,500
• 2005: 14,000
• 2006: 24,000

The IBC released a report detailing the deaths it recorded between March 2003 and March 2005 in which it recorded 24,865 civilian deaths. The report says the US and its allies were responsible for the largest share (37%) of the 24,865 deaths. The remaining deaths were attributed to anti-occupations forces (9%), crime (36%) and unknown agents (11%). It also lists the primary sources used by the media: mortuaries, medics, Iraqi officials, eyewitnesses, police, relatives, US-Coalition, journalists, NGOs, friends/Associates, other.

Another study by an Iraqi political party, the "People's Kifah, or Struggle Against Hegemony," reported the findings of a survey it conducted between March and June of 2003 throughout the non-Kurdish areas of Iraq. They tallied 36,533 civilians killed in those areas by June 2003. Information on this study was first published on the website of retired Wall Street Journal reporter Jude Wanniski in August of 2003. While detailed town-by-town totals are given by the PK spokesperson, details of methodology are very thin and raw data is not in the public domain. A still less detailed report on this study appeared some months later in Al Jazeerah. The Al Jazeera report claims the study covered up to October 2003, but this can not be accurate, as the exact same figures were already published on the Wanniski website in August of 2003.

Note that both groups above (IBC and PK) define the word civilian to exclude the various paramilitary forces operating in Iraq as well as the official military forces that existed under Saddam Hussein's regime.

As for the major combat phase of the war from March–April 2003, Abu Dhabi TV reported on April 8, 2003 that Iraqi sources had claimed that 1,252 civilians had been killed and 5,103 had been wounded. The Iraq Body Count project, incorporating subsequent reports, has reported that by the end of the major combat phase up to April 30, 2003, 7,299 civilians had been killed, primarily by US air and ground forces.

Iraqi refugees crisis

As of 2007 more Iraqis have lost their homes and become refugees than the population of any other country. Over 3.9 million people, close to 16% of the Iraqi population, have become uprooted. Of these, around 2 million have fled Iraq and flooded other countries, and 1.9 million are estimated to be refugees inside Iraq.

Iraqi insurgent casualties

There is a partial list of insurgents and militia members killed in the Iraq War according to a few published news sources. According to the list at least 8,000 insurgents have been killed during the war. See: List of Insurgents killed in Iraq.

Insurgent deaths, like civilian deaths, are hard to count or estimate. See: . See also the examples of undercounting shown in the next section.

Some claims are difficult to verify. For example; the claim by an Al Qaeda leader that 4000 foreign insurgents have been killed in the war. See this Sept. 28, 2006 Associated Press article:

The Lancet surveys did not ask whether the dead were combatants or not.

Undercounting

Most studies estimating the casualties due to the war in Iraq acknowledge various reasons why the estimates and counts may be low.

The October 2006 Lancet study states: "Aside from Bosnia, we can find no conflict situation where passive surveillance [used by the IBC] recorded more than 20% of the deaths measured by population-based methods [used in the Lancet studies]. In several outbreaks, disease and death recorded by facility-based methods underestimated events by a factor of ten or more when compared with population-based estimates. Between 1960 and 1990, newspaper accounts of political deaths in Guatemala correctly reported over 50% of deaths in years of low violence but less than 5% in years of highest violence." The report describes no other specific examples except for this study of Guatemala.

The Lancet reference used is to Patrick Ball, Paul Kobrak, and Herbert F. Spirer and their 1999 book, State Violence in Guatemala, 1960-1996: A Quantitative Reflection . From the introduction:

"The CIIDH database consists of cases culled from direct testimonies and documentary and press sources."

They report in chapter 7 :

"Figure 7.1 shows that in the CIIDH database, most of the information for human rights violations prior to 1977 comes from press sources. ... Approximately 10,890 cases were coded from the newspapers. Sixty-three percent of the press cases were taken from Prensa Libre, 10 percent from El Gráfico, 8 percent from La Hora and El Impacto respectively, and 6 percent from El Imparcial. The remaining 5 percent is made up by eight other newspapers."

But they reported that in later, more violent years:

"When the level of violence increased dramatically in the late 1970s and early 1980s, numbers of reported violations in the press stayed very low. In 1981, one of the worst years of state violence, the numbers fall towards zero. The press reported almost none of the rural violence."

There is a list of figures, tables, and charts in the book that can be used to calculate what percentage of the deaths were reported by the 13 Guatemalan newspapers for each year when compared to testimonies of witnesses compiled by popular organizations.

A July 28, 2004 article by The Independent reports that "some families bury their dead without notifying the authorities."

Stephen Soldz, who runs the website "Iraq Occupation and Resistance Report", wrote in a February 5, 2006 article : "Of course, in conditions of active rebellion, the safer areas accessible to Western reporters are likely to be those under US/Coalition control, where deaths are, in turn, likely to be due to insurgent attacks. Areas of insurgent control, which are likely to be subject to US and Iraqi government attack, for example most of Anbar province, are simply off-limits to these reporters. Thus, the realities of reporting imply that reporters will be witness to a larger fraction of deaths due to insurgents and a lesser proportion of deaths due to US and Iraqi government forces."

A June 25, 2006 Los Angeles Times article reports: "Many more Iraqis are believed to have been killed but not counted because of serious lapses in recording deaths. ... The [Los Angeles] Times attempted to reach a comprehensive figure by obtaining statistics from the Baghdad morgue and the Health Ministry and checking those numbers against a sampling of local health departments for possible undercounts."

An October 19, 2006 Washington Post article reports: "The deaths reported by officials and published in the news media represent only a fraction of the thousands of mutilated bodies winding up in Baghdad's overcrowded morgue each month. ... Bodies are increasingly being dumped in and around Baghdad in fields staked out by individual Shiite militias and Sunni insurgent groups. Iraqi security forces often refuse to go to the dumping grounds, leaving the precise number of bodies in those sites unknown. Civilian deaths, unlike those of American troops, often go unrecorded."

The Australian reports in a January 2, 2007 article that Iraqi government casualty estimates include "people killed in bombings and shootings but not deaths classed as 'criminal'." Also, they "include no deaths among the many civilians wounded in attacks who may die later from wounds. Nor do they include many people kidnapped whose fate remains unknown."

In a November 7, 2004 press release concerning the October 2004 Lancet study the Iraq Body Count project (IBC) states: "We have always been quite explicit that our own total is certain to be an underestimate of the true position, because of gaps in reporting or recording".

One of the sources used by the media are morgues. Only the central Baghdad area morgue has released figures consistently. While that is the largest morgue in Iraq and in the most consistently violent area, the absence of comprehensive morgue figures elsewhere leads to undercounting. IBC makes it clear that, due to these issues, its count will almost certainly be below the full toll in its 'Quick FAQ' on its homepage.

Quote from an IBC note : "The Iraq Body Count (IBC) estimate for x350, like that for x334, was made possible by examination of the detailed data supplied to the Associated Press (AP) by the morgues surveyed in AP's 23rd May 2004 survey of Iraqi morgues."

That May 23, 2004 Associated Press article points out the lack of morgue data from many areas of Iraq. Also, it states: "The [Baghdad] figure does not include most people killed in big terrorist bombings, Hassan said. The cause of death in such cases is obvious so bodies are usually not taken to the morgue, but given directly to victims' families. Also, the bodies of killed fighters from groups like the al-Mahdi Army are rarely taken to morgues."

Systematic underreporting by U.S.

An April 2005 article by The Independent reports:

"A week before she was killed by a suicide bomber, humanitarian worker Marla Ruzicka forced military commanders to admit they did keep records of Iraqi civilians killed by US forces. ... in an essay Ms Ruzicka wrote a week before her death on Saturday and published yesterday, the 28-year-old revealed that a Brigadier General told her it was 'standard operating procedure' for US troops to file a report when they shoot a non-combatant. She obtained figures for the number of civilians killed in Baghdad between 28 February and 5 April [2005], and discovered that 29 had been killed in firefights involving US forces and insurgents. This was four times the number of Iraqi police killed."

The December 2006 report of the Iraq Study Group (ISG) found that the United States has filtered out reports of violence in order to disguise its policy failings in Iraq . A December 7, 2006 McClatchy Newspapers article reports that the ISG found that U.S. officials reported 93 attacks or significant acts of violence on one day in July 2006, yet "a careful review of the reports for that single day brought to light more than 1,100 acts of violence." The article further reports:

"The finding confirmed a Sept. 8 McClatchy Newspapers report that U.S. officials excluded scores of people killed in car bombings and mortar attacks from tabulations measuring the results of a drive to reduce violence in Baghdad. By excluding that data, U.S. officials were able to boast that deaths from sectarian violence in the Iraqi capital had declined by more than 52 percent between July and August, McClatchy newspapers reported."

From the ISG report itself: "A murder of an Iraqi is not necessarily counted as an attack. If we cannot determine the source of a sectarian attack, that assault does not make it into the database. A roadside bomb or a rocket or mortar attack that doesn't hurt U.S. personnel doesn't count."

Casualties caused by criminal and political violence

In May 2004, the Associated Press completed a survey of the morgues in Baghdad and surrounding provinces, to tally violent deaths since President Bush declared an end to major combat operations on May 1, 2003. The survey covered through April 30, 2004. In that 12 month period in Baghdad alone, they counted 4,279 such deaths in a city of 5.6 million. This is an average of 357 killings per month in Baghdad. The figure excludes trauma deaths such as car accidents, falls, etc.. The article reports that this translates to 76 killings per 100,000 people, compared to 39 in crime-ridden Bogotá, Colombia, 7.5 in New York City, and 2.4 in neighboring Jordan. The article states that there were 14 killings per month in 2002 in Baghdad. That translates to 3.0 killings per 100,000 people in Baghdad itself in 2002 (the year before the war).

Morgues surveyed in other parts of Iraq also reported large increases in the homicide rate. For example, the rate in the province of Karbala, south of Baghdad, rose from an average of one homicide per month in 2002 to an average of 55 per month in the year following the invasion; in Tikrit, north of Baghdad, where there were no homicides in 2002, the rate had grown to an average of 17 per month; in the northern province of Kirkuk, the rate had increased from 3 per month in 2002 to 34 per month in the survey period.

From the AP article:

In Baghdad, a city of about 5.6 million, 4,279 people were recorded killed in the 12 months through April 30 [2004], according to figures provided by Kais Hassan, director of statistics at Baghdad's Medicolegal Institute, which administers the city's morgues. "Before the war, there was a strong government, strong security. There were a lot of police on the streets and there were no illegal weapons," he said during an AP reporter's visit to the morgue. "Now there are few controls. There is crime, revenge killings, so much violence." The figure does not include most people killed in big terrorist bombings, Hassan said. The cause of death in such cases is obvious so bodies are usually not taken to the morgue, but given directly to victims' families. Also, the bodies of killed fighters from groups like the al-Mahdi Army are rarely taken to morgues.

Non-Iraqi civilian casualties

Many non-combatants from both coalition and non-coalition countries have also been killed or wounded, including journalists and international aid personnel and foreign civilians. See the main overview chart at the top for numbers and more info.

Coalition military casualties

Most U.S. casualties, like these in a C-17, return to Dover AFB. The Pentagon has been reluctant to release photos of caskets but was forced due to the Freedom of Information Act.

For the latest casualty numbers see the overview chart at the top of the page. See also the icasualties.org site:

Since the official handover of power to the Iraq interim government on June 28, 2004, coalition soldiers have continued to come under attack in towns across Iraq.

National Public Radio has a month-by-month chart of American troops killed in the Iraq War.

The combined total of coalition and contractor casualties in the conflict is now over ten times that of the 1990-1991 Gulf War. In the Gulf War, coalition forces suffered around 378 deaths, and among the Iraqi military, tens of thousands were killed, along with thousands of civilians.

Troops fallen ill, injured, or wounded

See the overview chart at the top of the page for recent numbers.

On August 29, 2006 the Christian Science Monitor reported : "Because of new body armor and advances in military medicine, for example, the ratio of combat-zone deaths to those wounded has dropped from 24 percent in Vietnam to 13 percent in Iraq and Afghanistan. In other words, the numbers of those killed as a percentage of overall casualties is lower."

Many U.S. veterans of the Iraq War have reported a range of serious health issues, including tumors, daily blood in urine and stool, sexual dysfunction, migraines, frequent muscle spasms, and other symptoms similar to the debilitating symptoms of "Gulf War Syndrome" reported by many veterans of the 1991 Gulf War, which some believe is related to the United States' use of radioactive depleted uranium .

A study of U.S. veterans published in July 2004 in the The New England Journal of Medicine on posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and other mental disorders in Iraq and Afghanistan veterans found that 5 to 9.4% (depending on the strictness of the PTSD definition used) suffered from PTSD before deployment. After deployment 6.2 to 19.9% suffered from PTSD. For the broad definition of PTSD that represents an increase of 10.5% (19.9 - 9.4% = 10.5%). That is 10,500 additional cases of PTSD for every 100,000 U.S. troops after they have served in Iraq. ePluribus Media, an independent citizen journalism collective, is tracking and cataloging press-reported possible, probable, or confirmed incidents of post-deployment or combat-zone cases in its PTSD Timeline.

Information on injuries suffered by troops of other coalition countries is less readily available, but a statement in Hansard indicated that 2,703 UK soldiers had been medically evacuated from Iraq for wounds or injuries as of October 4, 2004 and that 155 UK troops were wounded in combat in the initial invasion .

Nightline controversy

Map showing U.S. casualty numbers by state

Ted Koppel, host of ABC's Nightline, devoted his entire show on April 30, 2004, to reading the names of 721 of the 737 U.S. troops who had died thus far. He did not mention deaths in Afghanistan. (The show hadn't been able to confirm the remaining 16 names.)

Claiming that this would constitute a political statement, the Sinclair Broadcast Group, a media company whose executives have strongly supported President Bush, took the unusual action of barring the seven ABC-affiliated stations it controls from airing the show. The decision to censor the broadcast drew criticism from both sides, including members of the armed forces, opponents of the war, MoveOn.org, and most notably Republican Senator John McCain, who denounced the move as "unpatriotic" and "a gross disservice to the public"

Dec. 25, 2006. U.S. military death total equals 9/11 death toll.

Many newspapers reported that on Christmas day, December 25, 2006 the total number of U.S. military deaths from the Iraq War equaled and surpassed the 2973 total deaths on 9/11 (not counting the 19 suicide hijackers). For example; a Dec. 27, 2006 Newsday article reported:

"A Christmas Day explosion pushed the number of American troops killed in Iraq above the Sept. 11, 2001, death toll. ... The bomb explosion Monday, which killed two soldiers south of Baghdad, raised the number of troops killed to 2,974 since the beginning of the Iraq war in 2003, according to a count by The Associated Press. Terrorists hijacked jetliners on Sept. 11, 2001, and crashed them into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field, killing 2,973 people."

Amputees

As of January 18, 2007, there were at least 500 American amputees due to the Iraq War. According to a Time magazine article, the 500th victim was a 24-year-old corporal, who lost both legs in a roadside bomb explosion on January 12, 2007. He was cared for at the military hospital in Landstuhl, Germany, and then was transferred to Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

The article reports: "The 500 major amputations — toes and fingers aren't counted — represent 2.2% of the 22,700 U.S. troops wounded in action. But the number rises to 5% in the category of soldiers whose wounds prevent them returning to duty."

Traumatic brain injuries (TBI)

A Feb. 2007 article by Discover magazine, titled "Dead Men Walking. What sort of future do brain-injured Iraq veterans face?", reports: "One expert from the VA estimates the number of undiagnosed TBIs at over 7,500. Nearly 2,000 brain-injured soldiers have already received some level of care, ..."

Mental Illness

A March 12, 2007 Time magazine article reports on a study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine. About one third of the 103,788 veterans returning from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars seen at Veterans Affairs facilities between September 30, 2001 and September 30, 2005 were diagnosed with mental illness or a psycho-social disorder, such as homelessness and marital problems, including domestic violence. More than half of those diagnosed, 56%, were suffering from more than one disorder. The most common combination was post-traumatic stress disorder and depression.

See also

• United States casualties of war
• Post-traumatic stress disorder
• Suicide bombings in Iraq since 2003
• Lancet surveys of mortality before and after the 2003 invasion of Iraq
• Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict
• Iraq Body Count project
• List of Coalition forces killed in Iraq in 2006
• Violence against academics in post-invasion Iraq

External links and references

(Additional links not found in the 2 reference sections higher up.)

U.S. military casualties only

• "Faces of the Fallen", Washington Post database of all U.S. service-member casualties from Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) and Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF)
• Statistical Summary: America's Major Wars (does not include Iraq War), cwc.lsu.edu
• "A Look At Those Who Died in Iraq", New York Times interactive
• U.S. Military Casualties, United States Department of Defense
• Timeline: US losses in Iraq since 1 May 2003, BBC News, last updated 5 May 2004
• "Honor the Fallen", database of U.S. troops killed in OIF and OEF
• "US Military Personnel Wounded in Iraq & Afghanistan: A Running Log", last updated 18 December 2003
• "U.S. Military Deaths in Bush's Iraq Quagmire", chart
• U.S. deaths in Vietnam and Iraq, comparative graph of casualties from beginning of conflicts, www.lies.com
• U.S. Casualties in Iraq, globalsecurity.org

Coalition (including U.S. and contractors) casualties only

• "Iraq War Coalition Fatalities", Flash graphic of Iraq map showing Coalition casualties over time with location, obleek.com

Iraqi casualties only

• Les Roberts seminar at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, on 13 April 2005; uploaded in http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5vD_Ub2K_c on 25 October 2006.
• BBC Quick guide: Violence in Iraq November 2006

General and miscellaneous

• "Wage Peace Movie", 2-minute web movie about casualties in Iraq from the American Friends Service Committee
• "Eyes Wide Open", a travelling exhibition on the human cost of war
• "Casualties of the War in Iraq", link and news aggregator, purposeless.com
• "Iraq: Journalists in Danger - A statistical profile of journalists killed on duty since March 2003 in Iraq", Committee to Protect Journalists
• "Likely Humanitarian Scenarios", UN internal memo predicting 100,000 direct and 400,000 indirect casualties as a result of the invasion, 10 December 2002