Study sees 655,000 Iraqi war deaths

WASHINGTON - About 655,000 Iraqis have died from the 3-1/2-year-old Iraq war, far more than previously estimated, public health experts said on Wednesday in a study President George W. Bush dismissed as not credible.

US and Iraqi researchers used household interviews rather than body counts to estimate how many more Iraqis have died because of the war than died annually before the war.

Deaths are occurring in Iraq at more than three times the rate before the invasion in March 2003, said researcher Gilbert Burnham of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Maryland.

The study published in the medical journal The Lancet estimated pre-war deaths at 143,000 a year.

Researchers estimated that as a result of the war, about 655,000 people in a country of about 27 million have died above the number expected to have died without war, Burnham said. That means 2.5 per cent of the Iraqi population has died because of the invasion and ensuing strife, he said.

At a White House news conference Bush said, "I don't consider it a credible report. Neither does General (George) Casey (top US commander in Iraq) and neither do Iraqi officials."

Earlier, Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman declined to dispute the study's estimate and said it was difficult to count civilian deaths. Whitman said the Iraqi health ministry is best positioned to come up with such figures.

Bush said, "I do know that a lot of innocent people have died, and that troubles me. And it grieves me." But he called the study's methodology "pretty well discredited." Last December, Bush estimated 30,000 Iraqis had died in the war.

Iraqi government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh told Reuters, "The report is unbelievable. These numbers are exaggerated and not precise." Iraqi government officials put the total Iraqi death toll since the war started at 40,000.

Bombs and gunfire

Burnham defended the study's methodology and described the difficulty of gathering data in wartime.

About 600,000 died from violence, most commonly gunfire but an increasing number from car bombs, Burnham said. But he said there also was a modest rise in deaths from non-violent causes such as heart disease, cancer and chronic illness.

The figures were based on a survey conducted by researchers from Johns Hopkins and Al Mustansiriya University in Baghdad between May and June of 1,849 households, including 12,801 household members, in 47 randomly selected sites across Iraq.

Researchers questioned the inhabitants about births, deaths and migrations. The same survey methods were used to measure mortality in other conflict areas such as the Congo, Kosovo and Sudan, the study said.

"Our total estimate is much higher than other mortality estimates because we used a population-based, active method for collecting mortality information rather than passive methods that depend on counting bodies or tabulated media reports of violent deaths," Burnham said.

Other estimates based on think tank figures and media sources have yielded lower estimates of Iraqi war deaths. The Iraq Body Count Database says between 43,850 and 48,693 civilians have died since the invasion.

This survey followed up on another Johns Hopkins survey that showed nearly 100,000 more people than normal died in Iraq between March 2003 and September 2004.

Nearly 60 per cent of the dead were boys and men aged between 15 and 44. In a teleconference, Burnham said "approximately 31 per cent of households attributed the death of their household member to coalition forces."

While the study was published weeks before US congressional elections, Burnham said it was not politically motivated.

- REUTERS