Source: Democracy Now!
by Amy Goodman and Les Roberts
November 1, 2004
A new independent, peer-reviewed study has concluded that at least 100,000 Iraqi civilians have died because of the U.S invasion last year.
The study entitled "Mortality Before And After The 2003 Invasion of Iraq: A Cluster Sample Survey" appears in Britain's foremost medical journal "The Lancet" and was conducted by researchers at Columbia University, Johns Hopkins and Al-Mustansiriya in Baghdad.
The estimated number of deaths of 100,000 is considerably higher than previous estimates. The study found the rise in the death rate was mainly due to violence and much of it was caused by U.S. air strikes on towns and cities. Most of the victims were women and children.
The U.S. military claims it does not keep tallies on civilian casualties but the London Independent is reporting that the Pentagon does collect data on Iraqi casualties and is keeping the results classified. The U.S.-backed interim Iraqi government has also suppressed casualty figures. An official at the Iraqi Health Ministry who was compiling data from hospital records last year was ordered by a superior in December to stop.
AMY GOODMAN: Les Roberts joins us, co-author of the study. He is an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Welcome to Democracy Now!
LES ROBERTS: Thank you very much. I am delighted to be with you.
AMY GOODMAN: Its good to have you with us. Explain the study. You were listening to Robert Fisk, your response?
LES ROBERTS: Sure. What we did was we got a breakdown of where people lived before the invasion: how many people were in Anbar province, how many people were in the city of Mosul and so on. At random, we picked 33 neighborhoods in the entire country, and essentially in a way that represented the pop lakes distribution on the first of -- population distribution on the first of January, 2003. When we go to the little villages or city neighborhoods, we would pick a point at random. We draw a map and pick one point on it, and go to that point and visit the nearest 30 houses, and we would knock on the door and we say, hello. We're from the university. We'd like to ask you a couple of questions. We said who lives here now? They gave us the age and gender of everyone. And then we said on the first of January, 2002, who lived here? Then we asked had anyone died or had anyone been born in the time in between? And my one authority of contradiction of what Mr. Fisk said is this wasn't an opinion poll. On a sub-sample of the deaths at the end of the interview when the people didn't know we were going to do this, we said, could you please show us the birth certificate, and four out of five times, the people could go back in their house and come back with the birth certificate. We're quite sure people didn't make up these deaths. These are something quite tangible. Lots of the people wept as they described the deaths. So, by going back to the beginning of 2002, we essentially knew the rate that people were dying at before the invasion. And we now know the rate after the invasion, and we compared the rates of death, and realized this is a nice advantage that every neighborhood is sort of being compared to itself. In this neighborhood,