US study says estimated 655,000 Iraquis died since invasion

dpa German Press Agency
Published: Wednesday October 11, 2006

London- The death toll among Iraqis has reached an estimated 655,000 since the US-led invasion three-and-a-half years ago, a study published in Britain's medical journal The Lancet said Wednesday. This meant that people were dying in Iraq at more than three times the rate before the invasion, research from the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, showed. "This clearly is a much higher number than many people have been thinking about," said Gilbert Burnham, the report's lead author and a professor at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at the university.

The study found that as many as 654,965 more Iraqis may have died since hostilities began in March 2003 than would have been expected under pre-war conditions.

In total around 2.5 per cent of the Iraqi population were said to have perished as a result of the war, mostly through violence.

The findings are based on a survey of 1,849 households conducted throughout Iraq between May and July this year.

According to the study, Iraq's violent death rate rose from 3.2 deaths per 1,000 people in the year after the invasion to 12 deaths per 1,000 from June 2005 to June 2006.

It confirmed research carried out by the same team in 2004, which estimated that 100,000 Iraqis had died, a figure dismissed as "overstated" at the time by officials in London and Washington.

According to Burnham, most of the deaths reported in the study were of military-age men. However, it was impossible to differentiate between civilians, insurgents and members of the Iraqi security forces.

© 2006 dpa German Press Agency