Counting the Dead in Iraq

[chlamor]

This is about the ninth “hot war” I’ve worked in. In most wars people are killed more by disease and disruption than by bullets and bombs. But when I read the newspaper reports on the war, all I heard about were the bullets and bombs. I didn’t think the reports were describing the suffering of the Iraqis very well.

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The bottom line is that by any measure the death rate after the invasion was far higher than the death rate before. Most of the deaths were violent and most of those deaths were caused by the coalition forces. There is little doubt that these “excess deaths” are as a result of the invasion and not some new flu epidemic or something else.

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Two thirds of all violent deaths in your survey were in one city — Fallujah. Why were the deaths so concentrated in this city?

The city was shelled extensively in the weeks before we were interviewing. We went and attempted to interview 30 households. Almost half of the houses we went to were empty.

http://www.uruknet.info/?p=m11207