One million Iraqis have been ki1led in the violence caused by the US-led invasion of March 2003, an independent think tank estimated based on the study published in prestigious medical journal The Lancet and the online civilian casualty database Iraq Body Count.
Just Foreign Policy pointed out that since the last scientific estimate of 601,000 violent Iraqi deaths attributable to the U.S.-led invasion was made over a year ago, it necessarily does not include Iraqis who have been ki1led since then.
"The Lancet study was based on a survey completed in July 2006. So, although at the time it was the best, indeed the only scientific estimate of Iraqi deaths, it is now a year old," Robert Naiman, National coordinator and senior policy analyst at Just Foreign Policy, said. "We wanted to provide an update of that so we have extrapolated from the numbers that the Lancet study reported, using the trend provided by the deaths reported by Iraq Body Count, which counts deaths reported in Western media. And our online estimate now stands at 999,987 -- so it's about to cross the one million mark."
To update The Lancet figure, Just Foreign Policy obtained a rate of how quickly deaths are mounting in Iraq using the the Iraq Body Count (IBC), which they consider to be the most reliable, frequently updated database of deaths in Iraq.
The think tank concedes that this combination of the IBC and the Lancet is not perfect, but expressed confidence that it is the best way of obtaining a rough estimate using existing tallies while awaiting another scientifically-based number.
"It's a little disappointing to see the belligerents in this particular conflict just rejecting these findings outright, and in doing so they have actually been expressing indifference in a time when they should be expressing compassion," Les Roberts, the Roberts is co-author of the study Mortality after the 2003 Invasion of Iraq: A Cross-Sectional Cluster Sample Survey, said. "There's a lot of complimentary evidence out there that our study has to be in the right ball park. For example ... a recent report from Oxfam of hundreds of thousands of war widows in Iraq -- or the U.N.'s claim some months ago that there are hundreds of thousands of war orphans in Iraq."
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