A new survey puts the Iraqi death toll at over one one million:
These findings come from a poll released today by O.R.B., the British polling agency that have been tracking public opinion in Iraq since 2005. In conjunction with their Iraqi fieldwork agency a representative sample of 1,461 adults aged 18+ answered the following question:-
Q How many members of your household, if any, have died as a result of the conflict in Iraq since 2003 (ie as a result of violence rather than a natural death such as old age)? Please note that I mean those who were actually living under your roof.
None 78%
One 16%
Two 5%
Three 1%
Four or more 0.2%Given that from the 2005 census there are a total of 4,050,597 households this data suggests a total of 1,220,580 deaths since the invasion in 2003. ...
As well as a murder rate that now exceeds the Rwanda genocide from 1994 (800,000 murdered), not only have more than one million been injured but our poll calculates that of the millions of Iraqis that have fled their neighbourhoods, 52% have moved within Iraq but 48% have crossed its borders, with Syria taking the brunt of refugees.
My back of the envelope calculation puts the 95% confidence interval at 1.1-1.3 million. This seems consistent with the second Lancet study giving 600,000 violent deaths when you take into account the amount of time that has passed since then. The surveyors in this study did not verify the deaths by asking to see death certificates, so this could bias the results upwards, but the experience in the two Lancet studies suggests that the great majority of people who report a death can verify with a death certificate. The number of households in Iraq has dropped by maybe 5-10% since 2005 because of all the people that have fled the country, so 1.2 million may be a little high, but it's likely that the number is now one million dead and another million injured as a result of the war.
The LA Times has picked up the story here. Comments from lenin and Stephen Soldz.
Interesting stuff. I have a high opinion of the ORB folks.
1) I agree that, given this sample size, the confidence interval would be quite narrow, although I can't tell from the write-up how much clustering was done. I assume that Tim's back-of-the-envelope calculation assumed (non-cluster) random sampling.
2) Would the math work out to a death rate of 40-45k per month since L2? 600,000 more deaths in the last 14 or so months. That would be 1,500 war-related deaths every day since July 2006.
3) What would the daily death rate be in Baghdad over the last year, assuming that both L2 and ORB are correct?
Even though I am a Lancet-skeptic, I try to be open to new information as it comes in. There is no doubt that this result is consistent with the Lancet results. Adjust your posteriors accordingly!
Glad someone did this. It's been infuriating, the number of polls done in Iraq with almost no attention given to the casualty rate (with the partial exception of that poll conducted earlier this year which asked about "persons harmed" in a given household.) You'd almost think people weren't interesting in knowing the answer.
Tim
What relationship does this firm have to the BBC? Do you know?
They're implying approx 840 extra deaths per day in Iraq as a result of the violence! Isn't a little common sense required at times?
LA Times is reporting:
According to the ORB poll, a survey of 1,461 adults suggested that the total number slain during more than four years of war was more than 1.2 million.
I don't think there has ever been a day reporting 840 slayings.
Donald,
I think it was not so much that people weren't interested in knowing the answer - plenty of people surely were - but that the thugs who controlled the Ministry of Health didn't want people calling their blatantly bogus figures into question. If that was the reason why so little data emerged, this study clearly indicates that the political situation has changed. Evidently it now suits the powers-that-be to allow the truth to come out. Why the change? I don't know.
Kevin, I was thinking more of the various polls that have been conducted in Iraq by Western groups--the ones we're always reading about which tell us how they feel about their government, the occupation forces, whether it's acceptable to attack occupation forces, etc... If the news organizations funding these polls wanted to estimate the death toll, they could have done this earlier.
Of course, there may also be a small error introduced by the fact that you can't poll a household that's been wiped out entirely...
"What relationship does this firm have to the BBC? Do you know?"
Easy. Gordon Heald has worked for Margaret Thatcher, President Reagan and Boris Yeltsin. The BBC has interviewed Margaret Thatcher, President Reagan and Boris Yeltsin. Stands to reason, dunnit?
Snark aside, your point is what, exactly?
I don't think there has ever been a day reporting 840 slayings.
Why would there ever be a day when all deaths got reported, whether by the decimated media, the death-squad loving Ministry of Health, or by anyone else?
The ORB Xcel spread sheet that shows the weighted figures suggests 1.2 million dead and 1.1 million injured. Has there ever been a war in history--seperate from organized genocides with concentration camps--where there have been more deaths than injuries? Typically in counterinsurgencies and civil wars there are at least 2-3 injured for every death.
The tables also reveal 264,000 car bomb deaths, most of which were inexplicably missed by the media (even though the whole point of car bombs is to call attention to them and even remote bombings of villages--like the recent attack against the Yizidis in northwestern Iraq--tend to be reported for this reason). ORB also estimates 347,000 injuries from car bombs. Does this low ratio of wounded to deaths make sense? Car bombs injure a lot more people relative to those they kill (from blast, shrapnel, etc.).
Ditto with air strikes: 116,000 deaths (mostly unnoticed despite insurgent/militia/anti-occupation incentives to publicize them) and 132,000 injuries from air strikes. Given the nature of aerial bombardment, does this under-reporting or ratio make sense?
A few other strange things from the detailed tables on ORB's website:
1. It looks like they oversampled Baghdad relative to its share of the population. This could be important in pushing numbers up.
2. Anbar is not included (as far as I can tell from the table listing provinces). Strange.
3. They undersampled Kurds and Shia Arabs relative to their percentage of the population, which would push numbers up given that violence in Iraq spiked last year when Shia militas began to cleanse Sunni neighborhoods in Baghdad, Diyala, etc.
4. They also interviewed a disproportionate share of non-Muslims (only 45% of respondents were "Muslim" overall and 28% percent in Baghdad -- the reset where orthodox, catholic, protestant, etc.). This is weird, but could conceivably push numbers up since religious minorities have been targets of some pretty terrible violence.
5. The study suggests a lot of movement/displacement. External refugee flows probably mean that ORBs baseline population estimate for Iraq is too high, and internal displacement has probably increased the average size of remaining households as people flee to live with relatives. Together, this would alter the total number of estimated households in Iraq downward and increase the average household size -- suggesting the ORB estimate is probably skewed high.
For all these reasons, it would be good to know more about the methodology here.
"If the news organizations funding these polls wanted to estimate the death toll, they could have done this earlier."
Donald, I really think you are being a bit harsh here. It's very clear that some very ruthless people, who control (after a fashion) an assortment of militias in various parts of Iraq, really did not like the idea of independent researchers asking questions about mortality. Asking about opinions is not the same at all. Why resistance to letting the truth come out has softened I really don't know.
Maybe it signals a new phase in the war. John Quiggin wrote an interesting post about this - there is often a stage in a conflict when the story changes from "Things are not nearly so bad as the media says" to "We are killing the enemy in huge numbers". I'm just speculating, but it seems to me a new policy is in place, otherwise this study could not have been done as openly as it evidently was.
1. These data can't be used to calculate a mortality rate. David Kane is thinking "whew! Thank goodness for that!"
2. I'm not sure where they get the 4.05 million HH number.
3. The ratio of reported deaths to injuries > 1.0
I would argue that the survey may undercount deaths a little. There are many Iraqis that have no household, no roof, no phone anymore. They probably haven't asked the Iraqi refugees in Syria if they had a death in the family.
CK:
Let me go out on a limb here and guess you don't speak Arabic.
grh: You are correct, although I read Arabic press in translation on Iraq almost every day. The 116,000 death figure for airstrikes works out to an average of 72 deaths every day for 1,600 straight days. Please forward stories from the Arab press suggesting this level of fatalities from any given day (since the end of declared major combat on May 1, 2003), let alone day after day after day after day . . . I have not seen such stories, but I'm open to being proven wrong.
CK -
264,000 car bomb deaths, most of which were inexplicably missed by the media
Given that there's a brutal war underway, with the highest casualty rate among media workers in any conflict in the modern era, I think the onus is on you to explain why you think the media would capture any but a tiny portion of car bomb (or any other) fatalities.
CK -
even though the whole point of car bombs is to call attention to them
Why would Baghdad, Washington, or the largely supine media want to draw attention to evidence - car bombs, lot's of them - of the complete failure to bring security (which entails fewer car bombs)?
"Why would Baghdad, Washington, or the largely supine media"
Definition of supine- "spineless"
Referring to:
NY Times
Wash. Post
LA Times
Yep the big american dailies sure are spineless when it comes to the bush administration. The ABC and NBC too.
They're all in the pockets of Hallibuton is my guess.
Damn Cheney. He's keeping this story out of the press again.
Ron F: Actually, my point was that the insurgents who conduct car bomb attacks do them to inflict mass casualties AND call attention to them -- they don't want them to go unnoticed and they have ready access to Iraqi and Arab regional media. The highest recorded death toll from one days bombings, 500, was the recent attack on the Yizidis (reported by Arab AND Western press despite being in a remote and isolated portion of northwestern Iraq). The highest level reported incidents before this are in the range of 150 -- and there haven't been that many. Yet, if ORB is right, there have been, on average, 165 car bomb fatalities every day for 1,600 straight days. If you are correct that the Western media (including media outlets in Europe that HATE this war) are systematically ignoring these deaths or are incapable of operating in Iraq (even with their Iraqi national staffs), please forward evidence from non-Western sources (the hundreds of insurgent websites, Arab media, Iraqi newspapers, etc.) that support this level of carnage.
A few somewaht rambling thoughts.
I think that, in a sense, confidence intervals are beside the point, though they will certainly be affected by clustering. As I remember, the design effect in both L1 and L2 was less than 2. So, not that bad.
But, I assume that there is a major amount of nonsampling error in these surveys. In this case, they were unable to even conduct the survey in three provinces. Given the arguments that have been raised against the ILCS, involving it having the mortality question embedded in a larger survey, I'm not sure if the ability to produce death certificates in L12 & L2 necessarily applies here.
Thus, I view these results as being like what Les Roberts said about L1 and L2. They help show that the mortality is huge. I say this because I hope people won't get fixated on precise numbers. I take L2 and the ORB survey/poll as suggesting that the number of dead is in the many hundreds of thousands. Whether it is >1,000,000 or <1,000,000 I don't really know and may never know. There is just too much noise in the chaos of Iraq to get precise numbers.
I know that in surveys in the relatively placid US on such issues as tobacco or substance use you can get a fair spread between surveys, well beyond the CIs of the respective surveys, probably due to nonsampling error. Surely we'd find the same in Iraq.
So, now we know that there is much evidence that the mortality is enormous. We also have increased evidence, as some of us have argued for a long time, that passive surveillance systems, like IBC and the alleged Ministry of Health and US military figures, when not simply politically manipulated (to be clear, I'm referring to the latter two sources, NOT IBC here, in terms of the numbers), are missing the vast majority of deaths.
Again, I hope we can avoid the fetishism of the number as we absorb this new, horrifying, result. To avoid the fetishism of the number is also to acknowledge that there may be some odd results that seem counterintuitive, like the car bomb figure. These results may either show that our intuitions are wrong or that there is more noise in the figures than that reflected by CIs. At this point, we simply don't, and probably can't know.
Ahh the troll JC trying to shift the metric to "media reported deaths". Laughable.
Kevin, I think that asking someone if they favor attacks on coalition forces is already delving pretty deeply into dangerous territory. If for some reason a question about death in the family is regarded as even more sensitive, so sensitive that nobody has dared to ask it outside the Lancet surveys and this poll, then that in itself is a fact worthy of front page notice in the mainstream press--"Iraq is so dangerous pollsters don't dare ask about deaths in the family."
As for what Iraqi sources say, I know there was one claim by an Iraqi group of over 30,000 violent deaths before the end of 2003, and another claim in 2005 of over 100,000 violent deaths, both much higher than IBC figures for the same periods. These claims were mostly ignored. I don't know if insurgent websites provide enough detail for someone to make any sort of estimate on the level of violence.
On wounded to dead ratios, wouldn't people be more likely to forget a wound in the family if the family member recovered? I think this issue about surprising levels of forgetfulness came up in one of the earlier Lancet threads. But I'm dipping into technical issues now, which I don't know much about. (Not that I know much about anything in this area, for that matter.)
I am not asking this because I am trolling; I simply do not know.
Is this how casualty rates are normally assessed? It seems like there are so many ways that inaccurate numbers could be reached this way - basically you're just asking how many people are dead? I guess counting bodies is impractical... But doing it as a survey seems really flimsy.
Donald, just a brief response while the English and South African rugby teams are singing their national anthems: it's probably a lot less dangerous to research whether Iraqis favour attacks on coalition forces rather than whether the Ministry of Health is cooking the morgue returns.
Beyond that I can only marvel at commenters whose argument runs: if ORB is sound then I have to change my views about the media, therefore ORB cannot be sound.
What's the surprise there? If you remember back to the precision missile and bomb attacks preceding the invasion, the Coalition of the Willing (Sick, eh?) destroyed principally civilian targets, not military targets. Rummy wiped out their phones, electrical power, water supply, transportation, and sewage system. The civil government collapsed, and criminals and warlords emerged as the new civil government.
When the military was quickly defeated, only the criminals and warlords remained in power.
The official story was that to help enable capitalism and democracy to arise spontaneously, the old order had to be destroyed first. Instead, we bombed them back to the stone age.
It helps to keep in mind that after the invasion was complete the great snark hunt began -- WMDs -- which occupied the attention of the coalition troops when they should have been rounding up all the munitions the Iraqi military left behind. Only when the last of the abandoned weaponry went into hiding did the snark hunt end. Rummy made the Iraqi insurgency the most lavishly armed insurgency in world history. We can thank Dickhead Don for supplying the Iraqis with the munitions they needed to produce their wonderful IEDs.
When there are more deaths than injuries, a likely answer is a policy of finishing off the wounded. When committing war crimes, eliminating witnesses is always a sound policy.
Onr things rings true in this survey - the high numbers of deaths by gunshot.
I remember a study published in Scientific American come years ago by two American academics that asserted the world's number one killer (other than disease or old age)was the AK47 assault rifle, the one of which arms-seller Samuel L. Jackson said in "Jackie Browne":
"If you have to kill everyone in the room , it must be an AK47"...
You cannot underestimate the lethality of modern automatic weapons, especially in enclosed spaces where bullets can be densely sprayed at the enemy or victim. The weapons in Iraq are probably ones stolen/ sold by the Saddam's disbanded army.
I do find the air attack deaths surprising high. However, we should not forget how ignorant we are of the true state of affairs in Iraq... the "media" do not have access to the whole of the country, being mostly confined to hotels or the Green zone, only getting around under with escorts.
Ditto with air strikes: 116,000 deaths (mostly unnoticed despite insurgent/militia/anti-occupation incentives to publicize them) and 132,000 injuries from air strikes. Given the nature of aerial bombardment, does this under-reporting or ratio make sense?
first point first:
if do not accept the main result of a poll, do NOT bother with subresults!
or the other way round: imagine, if they had the bomb dead wrong by 50%! oops, next to zero effect on totals!
there are airstrikes in Iraq every day. after over 1000 days of war, the number of dead is rather low. and the majority of "air strike dead" might still have happened during the initial invasion.
http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/62511/
A few other strange things from the detailed tables on ORB's website:
one more other strange things, from observing "iraq death toll critics": the majority of you has some serious lack in basic statistics!
1. It looks like they oversampled Baghdad relative to its share of the population. This could be important in pushing numbers up.
please, try to find out, what "oversampling" is.
hint: it has something to do with SUBSAMPLES, that you are interested in.
please assume, that the O.R.B. guys do HAVE some basic statistical understanding.
http://www.opinion.co.uk/who-we-are.aspx
2. Anbar is not included (as far as I can tell from the table listing provinces). Strange.
reading statistics, requires basic simple reading skills. in the article that Tim linked to, they explain that they ignored Anbar, because it was too dangerous!
http://www.opinion.co.uk/Newsroom_details.aspx?NewsId=78
4. They also interviewed a disproportionate share of non-Muslims (only 45% of respondents were "Muslim" overall and 28% percent in Baghdad -- the reset where orthodox, catholic, protestant, etc.).
please explain: what line in what table, did you take that information from?
http://www.opinion.co.uk/Documents/TABLES.pdf
5. The study suggests a lot of movement/displacement. External refugee flows probably mean that ORBs baseline population estimate for Iraq is too high, and internal displacement has probably increased the average size of remaining households as people flee to live with relatives. Together, this would alter the total number of estimated households in Iraq downward and increase the average household size -- suggesting the ORB estimate is probably skewed high.
wow. you really expect movement, death and displacement to bias numbers upwards?
instead of assuming, that those displaced might be the ones, who suffered the worst casualties? and will not be polled, because they are in a camp or abroad?
For all these reasons, it would be good to know more about the methodology here.
for all this reasons: i seriously doubt, that you are the right person, to challenge their methodology.
Presumably the destruction of infrastructure means that people who have been wounded are more likely to die because they don't have timely access to medical care, clean water, etc.
Hard to extrapolate this sample size to the entire population of Iraq, though, since all areas are not equal in violence?
Regardless of the actual numbers, even if this number overestimates the deaths 100 times over, it's still far too many.
Oh, so my kid is dead, but you had good intentions? Oh well, that's alright then. Carry on!
The real question, in my mind, is how many of those people would be dead if Saddam was still in power. I mean, "oppressed beats the hell out of dead" for most people. It's kind of scary when "we're from the government and we're here to help" becomes a question of whether it's 100,000 dead people more or less one way or another.
The whole thing is very depressing. If I weren't already a cynic and a nihilist, I'd have lost whatever faith I had in mankind.
Marcus Ranum asked:
No. Usually, civilian casualty rates are never assessed.
Re Marcus in #22 and Robert in #31, I'd add that to the extent that they casualties *are* addressed, all of the various methods (census figures, surveys, exhumation of bodies) suffer from varying degrees of uncertainty. In the case of a failed state, where the infrastructure has effectively collapsed, that uncertainty can be huge, and it might be necessary to wait for the return of some semblance of stability to determine the scale of the disaster. One method for evaluating casualties after the fact is to analyze the structure of the population, and compare the relative sizes of groups by age and sex with what we would expect to find in the absence of a mortality crisis.
Kind of depressing, huh? It may be another twenty years before we can determine just how much of a mess we've made.
Of course, for the people who *supported* the war, I suppose that works out pretty well.
Regards,
Bruce
Somebody pointed out that the CIA Factbook has a comparative death rate page (updated 9/7/07) that lists the following:
Death rate (deaths/1,000 population)
World - 8.37
U.S. - 8.26
Canada - 7.86
Iraq - 5.26
So according to the CIA Canada has a 49% higher death rate than Iraq. I'm not sure what methodology the CIA is using but I'm pretty sure it's bunk.
Hi Joe --
This isn't necessarily wrong. Countries with more advanced health care systems and longer life expectancy overall can easily have crude death rates in excess of less developed countries. A larger portion of the population will be very old, and consequently, more likely to die.
Regards,
Bruce
Thanks Bruce. It seemed wrong at first but I now understand the dynamic at work.
I wish we could get this level of discussion on the subject over at my post on the subject at Daily Kos, which you can find here. Stephen and joejoejoe have already been there, but you're all invited.
"Does this low ratio of wounded to deaths make sense? Car bombs injure a lot more people relative to those they kill (from blast, shrapnel, etc.)."
It is pretty hard to miss from inside 10 cm, and there are a whole lot of bodies dumped on the street with contact bullet wounds.
While the results are broadly consistent with the Lancet results - I think they are asking a different question.
The Lancet studies generally tried to COMPARE the mortality rates before and after the US began military operations - and indicate how many additional people died. This was an effort to gauge - not just how many people died from the obvious direct effects of war (people killed by gunfire - IED's - bombing raids - etc.), but also the people who died from the second order effects (diseases that were not treated well because the medical system was disrupted - people dying from overheating because the electrical system could not provide consistent power for air conditioning - etc.)
This study was asking individuals to make the assesment of whether someone in their family died because of the war - and pushes people toward only counting the "violent" deaths. I won't presume to know how Iraqis would answer this question if, for example, they had lost a family member to a disease that might have been curable if the US had not chosen to invade. Such an evaluation would require more knowledge of the exact text of the question (in the language it was asked) - and deep knowledge of Iraqi culture.
However, under the (I think plausible) notion that this survey ended up counting only the "direct" effect deaths (or even only some portion of the second order effect deaths), the Lancet results might actually have UNDER-estimated the Iraqi death rates. (NOT, I hasten to add, because of any pernicious intent on the part of the researchers - nor from any flaw in their method. Just because the Lancet studies could not be extremely precise, and were bound to be off in some direction.)
It's a survey, it must be correct! Right, Lambert?
Anyways, I have a brilliant idea. Why doesn't ORB employ the same methodology and figure out how many Americans have died from the war in Iraq? We know the exact figure for that, let's see how well their methodology does in a much more stable environment.
Of course, we'll just gloss over Iraqi culture where people may be considered the member of more than one household at any time within a span of four years. Not to mention that three provinces were not sampled at all. Etc. Etc.
Lambert doesn't care about such problems, so why should I?
In #12, Robert noted: "I'm not sure where they get the 4.05 million HH number."
I don't know where they got that number either, but it's fairly close to the figures in the 2004 UNDP ILC survey. In the tabular version (http://www.iq.undp.org/ILCS/PDF/Tabulation%20Report%20-%20Englilsh.pdf), on p. 22, the report shows a figure of 4.252 million as the total number of all households. It also shows a mean of 6.4 members per household, and a median of 6 members. There might be more precise numbers buried elsewhere in the report, but it's a couple hundred pages of stuff, and I'm not motivated enough to wade through all of it.
Regards,
Bruce
Running the numbers, according to ORB's survey, there's about 27 million Iraqis currently living in Iraq. Which is funny, because supposedly a few million Iraqis have fled Iraq since the war. The population of Iraq according to Lancet and the UN back in 2004 was exactly that, 27 million.
Using ORB's data, approximately a minimum of 5 million Iraqis fled their homes, with a maximum of 11 million, with an average of about 8 million.
So, according to ORB's numbers, 27 million Iraqis currently live in Iraq, with at around 4 million having fled the country, even though there were only 27 million Iraqis in 2004 according to the UN.
Something doesn't add up here, for those who care.
yes Seixon, and I'm sure that those who fled their homes had experienced much lower death rates than those who stayed. I'm sure they only fled to Syria because it has more KFC outlets.
Seixon,
A two to three percent growth rate is not uncommon in third world countries. Iraq was estimated at 2.6% in 2002.
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/fields/2002…
Over more than four years, that does give you a positive gain of over three million. So obviously it is possible to have 3-4 million people leave the country without causing the population to drop significantly; there's nothing obviously incorrect about the numbers you're reporting, despite your claims otherwise. If you care.
gz,
"A two to three percent growth rate is not uncommon in third world countries."
I see. So I guess since Iraq is just like all other third world countries, all other third world countries have the same displacement rate as Iraq? The same level of violence?
You're comparing apples to a maggot-infested apple. If you care.
SG,
So in response to a valid criticism of Lambert's complete disregard for critical thinking, you make some kind of joke to deflect, smearing me as someone who doesn't know why Iraqis would be fleeing their country.
Hey, whatever you have to do to protect the Emperor from the fact that he has no clothes.
Let's not even get started on the fact that the poll claims more people have died than have been injured by violence, which would be quite an amazing feat in the history of military conflict.
Let's just put our brain aside and nod like dumb sheep to whatever a polling firm releases, and whatever Tim Lambert tells us the Truth is.
All this has a name. It's called dishonesty.
tsk, Seixon, I am not smearing anyone. (Whatever that consists of in comments to a blog).
I am merely observing that the displaced population of Iraq would likely have had a higher death rate than those remaining, and including them in the denominator won't necessarily artificially push up death numbers (as you imply) since their higher death rate has been omitted from the numerator. If anything it would lower death rates, since the denominator of the CMR calculation has been inflated by about 4% but the numerator has been calculated assuming that 4% had a lower death rate than was probably the case.
As a finite population correction in the sample statistics it might serve to reduce the variance a little, artificially increasing significance of the finding, but that's unlikely to have much effect for a population change from 27 million to 24 million.
Before citing the ratio of deaths to injuries as a concern, can you answer the point repeatedly raised about this, that people don't get to go to hospital in a war-torn country? Also you might like to consider this quote from the BMJ:
which finishes with the conclusion "a high ratio of killed to wounded suggests a war crime". (This paper gives the minimum ratio of injuries to deaths as 0).
For the record, Seixon, nobody claims 4 million Iraqis "hav[e] fled the country." The generally accepted UN figure is 2.35-2.5 million, with another 2 million to 2.2 estimated to be internally displaced. Since there are no large refugee camps inside Iraq, presumably most have been displaced to other households. How many of them may have been surveyed, and how many may have lost members of their families would have been an interesting extra question for ORB to ask. I would think that displaced Iraqis might include comparatively high numbers of violently deceased members in their families.
I am not a statistician, or any kind of scientist, so my comments here I'm sure will be taken at lesser value than those with credentials. But I think some legitimate questions have been raised about the study, and I would be eager to know ORB's responses. But I am not willing to toss the poll out simply because some people consider the numbers far-fetched.
We all know that polling operations can do some awfully sloppy work. I've seen plenty of that myself, including from organizations like Gallup, and I think that should be taken into account in this case.
My chief concerns fall into two categories: respondent comprehension and truthfulness; sampling, methodology and extrapolation.
As we know from polls in the United States, respondents sometimes lie, as when pollsters ask white citizens whether they would vote for a black candidate. Why Iraqis, especially large numbers of Iraqis, answering such a poll might choose to lie I do not know. There might be myriad reasons. Likewise, they may have taken the question to mean something else than it does. I have not seen the Arabic version (my stepdaughter can translate for me), so I don't know if it might be misinterpreted in some way that would inflate the Yes answers.
Was Baghdad oversampled? I can't agree with Stephen that the failure to ask for death certificates does not harm the results. Because it definitely is a drawback to anyone trying to defend ORB's numbers in the non-scientific world.
I would certainly like to see someone with more brains and relevant experience than I have to ask these questions directly of ORB and then write them in a way that is understandable to a general audience.
I can't agree with Stephen that the failure to ask for death certificates does not harm the results. Because it definitely is a drawback to anyone trying to defend ORB's numbers in the non-scientific world.
Lancet did ask for death certificates. the "sceptics" simply assume, that the doctors faked those results.
there is NO way you can persuade persons, who deny to be persuaded. they are entitled to a math of their own. sigh.
I see. So I guess since Iraq is just like all other third world countries, all other third world countries have the same displacement rate as Iraq? The same level of violence?
do you have ANY evidence, that (natural) iraqi population growth is significantly down?
do you understand, that those who fled will have taken MORE casualties?
sod, I know the people who did the studies that Lancet published obtained death certificates as part of their verification effort. My point was that the ORB surveyors did not do so, and that this "failure" will be just one more item used to hammer their results. Not that they wouldn't be hammered anyway, of course.
Oooh! Evolution at work!
[Typically in counterinsurgencies and civil wars there are at least 2-3 injured for every death.]
veterans of these debates will remember that in the past this factoid (which has little or no actual support from evidence - it is in fact mainly drawn from miniature wargaming rulebooks) referred to battlefield troops. Clearly this was a counter-adaptive quality for a factoid to have in the context of the Lancet debates, as it was rather egregiously irrelevant. Now we are seeing a new, mutated version of the factoid, where it refers to "counterinsurgencies and civil wars". It still has the fatal structural weakness of having no citations at all, but I suspect that the new version may proliferate a bit better. Gosh isn't evolution interesting.
The factoid is untrue by the way - when sectarian death-squads take someone out and murder them with a drill to the head, it is unusual for three other people to be caught in the cross-drilling.
seixon says:
"Of course, we'll just gloss over Iraqi culture where people may be considered the member of more than one household at any time within a span of four years."
The polling firm said:
"Please note that I mean those who were actually living under your roof."
You can say that this qualification in the question might still cause confusion--you'd likely be wrong--but it is certainly not "gloss[ing] over" Iraqi culture. Claiming that it is would would be, well, let me use your words: "It's called dishonesty."
Looking at the earlier John Hopkins/Lancet study, one figure I jiggered out of the data is a combatant:noncombatant ratio inferred from the male:female ratio of 10:1.
A disparity that high beyond normal male:female distribution has to happen for a reason. I found it strange that the study authors didn't comment on the obvious disparity in male:female casualties?
From an earlier Washington Post article, dated Oct. 2006 ..
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/10/AR20061…
"....Of the 629 deaths reported, 87 percent occurred after the invasion. A little more than 75 percent of the dead were men, with a greater male preponderance after the invasion. For violent post-invasion deaths, the male-to-female ratio was 10-to-1, with most victims between 15 and 44 years old...."
The casualty ratio of men:women is 10:1 (violent deaths, not all deaths). The data strongly suggests to me that the higher probability of male mortality was b/c the bulk of them were in fact direct participants in violent situations, i.e. *combatants.* Unless I were to factor some kind of "honor code" proscribing the killing of women & children, I'll impute the male:female ratio as indicative of the larger (worldwide) cultural bias of male involvement in civil strife without any kind of "honor" discount.
Again, from the Washington Post article:
"...Of the total 655,000 estimated "excess deaths," 601,000 resulted from violence and the rest from disease and other causes, according to the study."
So let's do some accounting:
1) 55k / 655k = 8% chance of dying from disease (male & female) or 92% chance due to violence.
2) If 90% of violent male deaths died as combatants (10:1 ratio males:females violent deaths), we can infer that culturally the lower death rate for women is significant here, b/c they were likely noncombatants. We can use that ratio for all combatant:noncombatant deaths, then.
3) 655k * .75 = 491k male dead (75% total dead are male)
4) 491k * .92 = 451k males died from violence (not from 8% chance of disease)
5) 451k * .90 = 405k males died as combatants
6) 405k / 655k = 62% of the dead were combatants
That accounting suggests 62% of the total deaths (& 82% of male deaths) were combatant or those who were somehow participating in violence during JH's 3-year period (2003-2006).
- 83k noncombatant deaths/year ( 249k )
- 18.3k deaths/year from disease (average only....)
During Saddam's reign - especially since the Gulf War in 1991 - the average Iraqi mortality numbers due to murder & disease was around 60k/year, 30k/yr due to murder & another 30k/yr. due to disease (in large part, child mortality).
There were also the NGO & an ABC-sponsored surveys that were contemporaneous with John Hopkins' surveys & used many more clusters. Those found a much lower overall death rate. Both were well above Iraq Body Count's (IBC) figures, indicating under-reporting problems with mere media surveys.
Hope that helps,
/lee
I've posted here a comparative chart and spreadsheet with the four surveys and the contemporaneous IBC body counts. The ORB survey estimate of total deaths by violence(1.22m) is within a whisker of Lancet 2 updated according to the IBC timeline (1.16m), assuming a constant IBC undercount.
Leebert: "the bulk of them were in fact direct participants in violent situations, i.e. combatants."
Like the Moslem men and boys at Srebenica.
Leebert:
Could you tell me something?
If an armed group goes into a village and kills all the men and rapes all the women (not an unusual happenstance in terrorist insurgencies), what would be the male/female mortality ratio from that incident?
leebert: "I found it strange that the study authors didn't comment on the obvious disparity in male:female casualties?"
How did you deduce that they didn't? Not by reading the study, that's for sure.
Stephen Soldz's remarks seem on-target to me. What this poll seems to show (unless there is a considerable amount of lying going on, or spectacular incompetence in sampling) is that the death toll is somewhere in the neighborhood of one million, give or take a few hundred thousand. You can argue it's less than a million if you think the number of households is less than 4 million, or you can claim that the refugees outside the country have a lower death rate or both, but you're not going to get the death toll all the way down to IBC levels that way.
So the fallback position is that either the respondents lied, the pollsters lied, or they did a really amazingly poor job picking out their sample.
veterans of these debates will remember that in the past this factoid (which has little or no actual support from evidence - it is in fact mainly drawn from miniature wargaming rulebooks) referred to battlefield troops.
it is not entirely tabletop based :)
the number i remember from army times, was between 3 and 6 to 1, and there were more detailed estimates about the seriousness of wounds and the casualty ratios for battalions performing different missions. i am rather sure those numbers can be verified in some older military books.
but those numbers are military wound/death ratios, in conventional battle. they are easy to track, because all soldiers wounded will be handled by the military medical system, as will be the dead.
the situation for civilians, in a civil war situation is completely different. the number given in one of the article linked to above (between 2 and 10 to 1, perhaps even below 1 to 1) sound absolutely right to me.
most factors for a different death to wounded ratio have been named already: shooting bound men, huge car bombs, failing medical system, people not remembering wounds, but deads.
Meteor Blades,
"For the record, Seixon, nobody claims 4 million Iraqis "hav[e] fled the country.""
That's what ORB's data suggests, which was exactly my point. It's ludicrous, but none of you anti-war liberals would ever be critical of a single damn study that comes up with what you want. Don't let me stop you from BELIEVING in things that on their face are ridiculous. That is your wont, which you display quite well on DailyKos on a daily basis.
Lee,
They did.
"Across Iraq, deaths and injuries from violent causes were concentrated in adolescent to middle age men. Although some were probably combatants, a number of factors would expose this group to more risk--eg, life style, automobile travel, and employment outside the home. The circumstances of a number of deaths from gunshots suggest assassinations or executions. Coalition forces have been reported as targeting all men of military age."
That's what ORB's data suggests, which was exactly my point. It's ludicrous, but none of you anti-war liberals would ever be critical of a single damn study that comes up with what you want. Don't let me stop you from BELIEVING in things that on their face are ridiculous.
sorry, Seixon, but most people commenting here, stick to rather conservative estimates.
i have seen little (perhaps no!) discussion of upper boundaries of confidence intervals.
in contrast, the points that you brought up above, make absolutely ZERO sense. the idea, that ignoring refugees would drive casualty numbers up, is idiotic.
the provinces that were not polled, suffer WORSE violence, than those which were.
you ve been shown facts, that suppose that reproduction most likely has replaced the majority of those who fled.
James Wimberley, I very much appreciate the spreadsheet and follow-up commentary at your site.
I find the argument that we couldn't have missed nearly that many car bombings convincing. Car bombs are large enough events to have the vast bulk of them go unreported. So that one number being so much higher than seems supported by other evidence should make one suspicious that something is happening in the methodology. Others have discussed whether the survey participants definition of family may significantly differ from what we assume. I don't know if that is the cause, but I suspect some sort of systemic error is inflating the numbers computed by these surveys.
Seixon: "none of you anti-war liberals would ever be critical of a single damn study that comes up with what you want."
... and none of you pro-Iraq-war "conservatives"* would ever be accepting of a single damned** study that does not come up with what you want."
*I use the term very liberally because you are not real conservatives, at least not in the dictionary sense of the word. No true conservative would (or does) support the Iraq war, which represents everything that true conservatives despise: global interventionism run amok, waste and corruption run amok (to the tune of half a trillion dollars and counting), a bloated government run amok that is growing at leaps and bounds and borrowing and spending as if there is no tomorrow -- in short, a government that is devouring everything in its path. There is a very good reason why Alan Greenspan recently said that Bush and his Republican party had "swapped principle for power," he wrote. "They ended up with neither. They deserved to lose."
**"damned", from the get go, by right-wing nuts, because it reveals the truth.
JC joins a long, honorable list that includes Lord HawHaw and ambassador Ribbentropp. Good show, JC. Lying for fascism is a virtue, you'll go to Nazi Valhalla, rest assured. 72 Valkyries will attend your every need.
"in contrast, the points that you brought up above, make absolutely ZERO sense. the idea, that ignoring refugees would drive casualty numbers up, is idiotic.
the provinces that were not polled, suffer WORSE violence, than those which were.
you ve been shown facts, that suppose that reproduction most likely has replaced the majority of those who fled."
Long-time readers of Deltoid will recall Seixon's furious insistence that there was no civil warin Iraq and that anyone who said didn't was a dirty anti-American islamofascist-lover who wanted Saddam back in power and a racist who believed Arabs were innately incapable of democracy.
Denying reality is what he specialises in.
What change ? You still have the same Iraqi families conspiring to never tell anyone that someone killed hundereds of family members each day. You still have some unknown party killing these people - when the US, aQ, etc are happy to claim and publicise their operations and it's not them that's doing this killing.
You still have 700+ dead peopl unaccounted for every day of the week that nobody (nobody) wants to mention even anecdotally.
Nothing seems to have changed here from the situation when Lancet 2 was released.
Because killing 800 people takes some work. Requires some action that might be noticed by someone (anyone). Because "anyone else" includes the families of those people killed who generally want to bury their dead, claim compensation and lodge claims for property rights.
What were you thinking ? That Arabs are so fkn alien that you could kill 800 of em every day and nobody could think of a reason to mention it ?
Has anyone ever explained how the Arab media -where you would look for the most complete reporting on an Arab country before, during and after the invasion - was decimated ? Has Rupert Murdoch told them, in Arabic presumably, to focus more on Brittney and less on their regular stories ?
No, the onus would be on you to figure out WTF you think the media has got to do with it, then adjust your hypotheticals accordingly.
Car bombs explode. Police and emergency workers get called in, then the coalition forces get reports of this, then the hospitals deal with the result. If there are media photographers available they get sent to the scene.
Apart from that the media picks this shit up off police and coalition daily reports. There really isn't even the threat of paper cuts to someone reporting that car bombings occurred, when all you are doing is reading reports of this. There's not even a requirement to be in Iraq to report these things. Clue up. And look for a new explanation while you're at it.
Well I'm skeptical of the Lancet figures and suggesting people faked things doesn't come into it.
The deaths sampled in the last Lancet study were said to be supported by those death certificates you mention to a degree higher than 90%. For every 10 dead 9 were said to have death certificates.
Yet using these sampled deaths the authors estimated a violent deaths figure 10 times the amount of deaths recorded by ANY other means, death certificates, other studies, press reports etc. For every 10 deaths estimated less than 1 has a death certificate (or any other means documenting it occurring).
So no, I don't claim Iraqi doctors faked anything. I say it's pretty fkn obvious the study was screwed up when you make a point of stating your sample correlates with supporting evidence to a degree of 90% but your estimates drawn from that same data shows the complete opposite.
So who are you talking about as having their own math ? As claiming that death certificates are bullshit ?
Every time what I point out what I just did here the response -- in defense of Lancet -- is that these death certificates cannot be trusted.
Ignoring of course the obvious explanation that it is just the Lancet estimate that is untrustworthy for the glaring obvious reason everyone can see. That it says there are a shitload of dead people that nobody else says are there. Not even the families.
Others have discussed whether the survey participants definition of family may significantly differ from what we assume. I don't know if that is the cause, but I suspect some sort of systemic error is inflating the numbers computed by these surveys.
why don t you simply tell them? there phone number is on the page:
http://www.opinion.co.uk/who-we-are.aspx
just tell them about your concerns! you, an experienced poster and sceptic, believe that they, the unexperienced pollsters and left wing conspirators got it wrong.
international calls are pretty cheap these days.
You still have some unknown party killing these people - when the US, aQ, etc are happy to claim and publicise their operations and it's not them that's doing this killing. You still have 700+ dead peopl unaccounted for every day of the week that nobody (nobody) wants to mention even anecdotally.
every time, when iraqi health officials, the UN or US forces published monthly data, it was an UPWARD correction of the news paper counts!
hint: the papers might miss an occasional dead.
simple exercise: please link a western newspaper report of the last couple of days, that reports people dieing LATER of the wounds suffered from a car bomb.
Has anyone ever explained how the Arab media -where you would look for the most complete reporting on an Arab country before, during and after the invasion - was decimated ?
so, who is counting death reported by the arab press? links please!
Car bombs explode. Police and emergency workers get called in, then the coalition forces get reports of this, then the hospitals deal with the result. If there are media photographers available they get sent to the scene.
sorry, but this is NOT downtown Manhattan. the truth looks more like this:
no emergency workers show up, wounded are transported by regular cars. the police might have been involved in the bombing. no reporter EVER was in this part of the town.
Yet using these sampled deaths the authors estimated a violent deaths figure 10 times the amount of deaths recorded by ANY other means, death certificates, other studies, press reports etc. For every 10 deaths estimated less than 1 has a death certificate (or any other means documenting it occurring).
by any other means, except this ORB pol, you mean. or similar polls in the past.
the "death certificates problem" has a simple solution:
death certificates are still handed out by local doctors. but the reports do not filter through to national level.
please read the lancet authors on this subject.
Now they've told Riyadh Lafta's fieldworkers twice, and O.R.B.'s fieldworkers once. Sounds like they're happy to tell anyone who'll listen.
How do you get from the US and al Qaeda being happy to publicize their operations, to their being anxious to determine and publicize the total resultant body count?
For that matter, what makes you think that the various subgroups of the Mahdi army, and the other Shia and Sunni paramilitary factions, are interested in publicizing their operations? If your goal is ethnic cleansing, or extortion, or kidnapping for profit, you have little reason to tell the media how many people you've killed along the way.
No shit. The point you seem to have missed is the largest of those UN and other surveys still only come to 10% of Lancet's violent deaths estimates.
So we're not talking about the papers missing some of those killed violently in Iraq. We're talking about the papers (english, french, arabic, persian, all of them) and every other means by which they could be recorded, measured or estimated missing 900 out of every 1000 killed by violence in Iraq. 90% is not "some", it is the overwhelming majority and quite close to "all".
Which in turn requires these to be missed by the police and coalition forces who do the reporting of these bodies.
I don't need to drop hints as to whether that's ridiculous.
Excercise in what though? You just said you were aware that newspaper counts aren't worth shit when it comes to recording deaths. You now want to use this premise as meaning something though.
As I said, the death certificates, audited against hospital records, other surveys, none of em can account for where these other dead people are. In fact Lancet was the only source suggesting they exist and nothing else since.
I could put an end to these rumours about global warming with non-evidence that convincing and contradicted by all other available data, including the study's own.
Something this blog ridicules 6 days a week, and defends on the 7th when it comes to Iraqi death estimates.
Why would the wounded be transported? What on a sight seeing tour to calm their nerves? Think it through nimrod, whether an ambulance is used or a car the destination where the records are kept is the same.
As is your premise, that 90% of violent deaths like this could go uncounted, unreported and unmentioned by families because of cars and police and something something more credible, as yet unmentioned.
Which police would these be? Those who are overwhelmingly the target of these bombings or operated by the religious group targeted?
Not too concerned with credibility are you.
As I already, no reporter ever need be either.
What you've quoted when you wrote this wasn't referring to any "death certificates problem" though. There's one word capitalised for emphasis in what I wrote, which you are again more than happy to ignore for obvious reasons.
Likewise, I'm sure you won't be recommending me to read what the Lancet authors wrote on why nobody can find 9/10 of everyone killed in Iraq, because nobody has ever written an explanation this. That's why the Pulitzer for that story hasn't been awarded yet.
What ethnic cleansing?
I haven't heard anything about police abducting whole families of sunnis in the middle of the night and dumping their bodies in public, in groups, complete with torture wounds, gunshot wounds to the head and police issue handcuffs.
Have you? Because if you do hear about it, like everyone else who's read something about it, you might start to get the idea that those carrying out the systematic killing of sunnis aren't hiding it that well.
Nor those carrying out the distinctly non-covert car bombings in the middle of markets, in the day time.
You know... the violence that's accounting for the majority of Iraqi deaths that are recorded. The 10%.
WTF is accounting for the other 90% is anyone's guess. You got any thoughts ?
Kilo wrote: "We're talking about the papers (english, french, arabic, persian, all of them) and every other means by which they could be recorded, measured or estimated missing 900 out of every 1000 killed by violence in Iraq. 90% is not "some", it is the overwhelming majority and quite close to "all"."
The presumption here is that the hinterland of Iraq is something like downtown New York where a large number of deaths could not go unnoticed. In Iraq, the reporters (english, french, arabic, persian, all of them) are confined to their hotels or to travelling with large numbers of armed escorts. We know little or nothing about conditions in the interior of the Iraqi provinces, except maybe Kurdistan, where there is relative quiet.
The best comparison here is with the Eastern Congo/Rwanda where one of the most genocidal wars on the planet has been raging for up to ten years. It is generally agreed that over 1,000,000 people (mostly civilians) have been slain, most by armed death squads from either side, or by criminal gangs. Yet, there have been little or no newspaper reports of the deaths or the violence because no reporters have been able to get to the scene to do the reporting.
The question for Kilo to answer is: if things are not as bad as reported, and if matters are even improving, then why have over 2,000,000 Iraqis fled the country, and 1,000,000 more fled internally? The level of population movement is of the order of that recorded in Darfur or Congo, and only an extreme level of violence could cause that many people to flee from homes where their families had lived safely and securely for generations.
I have my own doubts about this latest survey, and the Lancet surveys, not about the analytic methods uses, or the motives of the statisticians, but about the accuracy of the base data. One thing I am convinced about: the death rate in Iraq is far higher than either the Iraqi Ministry of Health, John Howard or George W. Bush would have us believe.
"Denying reality is what he specialises in."
Anyone know where all the dead people are buried? What about you Ian. Surely the cemeteries in Baghdad must be swelling with hundreds of bodies a day. Are they?
"What ethnic cleansing? I haven't heard anything about police abducting whole families of sunnis in the middle of the night and dumping their bodies in public, in groups, complete with torture wounds, gunshot wounds to the head and police issue handcuffs."
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article548945.ece
"Across central Iraq, there is an exodus of people fleeing for their lives as sectarian assassins and death squads hunt them down. At ground level, Iraq is disintegrating as ethnic cleansing takes hold on a massive scale.
By Patrick Cockburn in Khanaqin, North-East Iraq
Published: 20 May 2006
The state of Iraq now resembles Bosnia at the height of the fighting in the 1990s when each community fled to places where its members were a majority and were able to defend themselves. "Be gone by evening prayers or we will kill you," warned one of four men who called at the house of Leila Mohammed, a pregnant mother of three children in the city of Baquba, in Diyala province north-east of Baghdad. He offered chocolate to one of her children to try to find out the names of the men in the family.
Mrs Mohammed is a Kurd and a Shia in Baquba, which has a majority of Sunni Arabs. Her husband, Ahmed, who traded fruit in the local market, said: " They threatened the Kurds and the Shia and told them to get out. Later I went back to try to get our furniture but there was too much shooting and I was trapped in our house. I came away with nothing." He and his wife now live with nine other relatives in a three-room hovel in Khanaqin.
The same pattern of intimidation, flight and death is being repeated in mixed provinces all over Iraq. By now Iraqis do not have to be reminded of the consequences of ignoring threats.
In Baquba, with a population of 350,000, gunmen last week ordered people off a bus, separated the men from the women and shot dead 11 of them. Not far away police found the mutilated body of a kidnapped six-year-old boy for whom a ransom had already been paid.
The sectarian warfare in Baghdad is sparsely reported but the provinces around the capital are now so dangerous for reporters that they seldom, if ever, go there, except as embeds with US troops. Two months ago in Mosul, I met an Iraqi army captain from Diyala who said Sunni and Shia were slaughtering each other in his home province. "Whoever is in a minority runs," he said. "If forces are more equal they fight it out." "
...
"Salam Hussein Rostam, a police lieutenant in charge of registering and investigating people arriving in terror from all over Iraq, gestured to an enormous file of paper beside him. "I've received 200 families recently, most of them in the last week," he said. This means that about one thousand people have sought refuge in one small town. Lt Rostam said that the refugees were coming from all over Iraq. In some cases they had left not because they were threatened with death but because they were fired from their jobs for belonging to the wrong community. "I know of two health workers from Baghdad who were sacked simply because they were Kurds and not Shia," he said."
...
"Since the destruction of the mosque in Samarra sectarian warfare has broken out in every Iraqi city where there is a mixed population. In many cases the minority is too small to stand and fight. Sunnis have been fleeing Basra after a series of killings. Christians are being eliminated in Mosul in the north. Shias are being killed or driven out of cities and towns north of Baghdad such as Baquba or Samarra itself.
Dujail, 40 miles north of Baghdad, is the Shia village where Saddam Hussein is accused of carrying out a judicial massacre, killing 148 people after an attempt to assassinate him in 1982. He is on trial for the killings. The villagers are now paying a terrible price for giving evidence at his trial.
In the past few months Sunni insurgents have been stopping them at an improvised checkpoint on the road to Baghdad. Masked gunmen glance at their identity cards and if under place of birth is written "Dujail" they kill them. So far 20 villagers have been murdered and 20 have disappeared. "
Kilo, Arguments from personal incredulity are simply fallacious. You, typing away on your little computer in a city with fully operational emergency, health and journalistic services, cannot imagine that all these deaths are not being reported. That's not an argument, because it is well within the range of possibility that many deaths are going unreported--even 90% or more. To show that it is plausible for the media to miss such reports, there should be some evidence that reporting in Iraq is difficult.
Well:
That was 2005. In 2003, the reporters could talk to everyone, but then had to move from a bed and breakfast to a compound that "resembles a base for a Colombian drug lord." Journalists in Iraq could easily miss 90% of deaths if they are holed up in compounds.
Anyway, stick to logic. Why would the survey get such a wrong number? Point to something in the design of the survey or some plausible explanation for its inaccuracy. Don't waste our time with arguments from incredulity.
http://www.news.com.au/adelaidenow/story/0,22606,16290565-1702,00.html
"THE number of dead Iraqi civilians counted at the Baghdad morgue hit 1100 in July, the highest toll in recent history, a British newspaper reported today, blaming the daily violence.
...
By comparison, equivalent figures for July 1997, 1998 and 1999 - during the leadership of former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein - were all below 200, The Independent said."
So that's up to 900 additional deaths per month reported at ONE morgue.
What proportion of the dead never make it to the morgue?
Les Roberts did suggest that reporters go to gravediggers and ask if there had been a huge increase in burials during the postwar period. The IBC figures wouldn't cause much of a blip. I don't know that anyone has taken him up on it.
I don't know if the Lancet/ORB numbers are correct, but it's surprising that someone would think that reporters of any ethnicity could go around reporting most of the violent incidents, when this is one of the most dangerous wars for reporters on record. (My own complaint about the press is that they don't stress the issue enough, not that they could settle it with a more determined effort to see for themselves.) Even in IBC reports most of the bodies they count (last time I looked) actually came from police or government reports, not eyewitness accounts that reporters themselves investigated. The US government has made it a point not to do bodycounts in this war--Bush has complained about this from time to time, because it makes it seem like the enemy is causing the deaths of thousands and wounding tens of thousands of US troops without any reply from our side. You have to figure the US is probably dealing out much higher numbers of casualties in return, probably including many civilians in the process, but one reads almost nothing about this. As for the Iraqis, there are so many factions there, many infilitrated directly into the government, it's rather ridiculous to imagine one could trust anything they put out. Of all the places where one could expect the government to be willing or able to report war deaths accurately, Iraq seems pretty far down on the list.
And as for anecdotes, again, there have been reports by Iraqi groups which claim to have done actual counts of the dead and their numbers were much higher than IBC figures at the time. 37,000 dead by August 2003, I think in one case, and 128,000 or so by mid 2005 in the other. Lower than L2 would imply, at least in the latter case, but a lot higher than IBC. And then there was the Iraqi health minister right after L2 came out who claimed the death toll was 150,000 (I forget what category he was counting), which was about 3 times higher than the IBC number at the time.
If the Lancet and ORB polls had never existed, I'd still take for granted the violence might be much much higher than the IBC figure. A factor of ten higher would surprise me, but not beyond all reason.
Jc asks: "Surely the cemeteries in Baghdad must be swelling with hundreds of bodies a day. Are they?"
Says Louse Roug, LA Times: "In the Sunni cemeteries serving Baghdad, a city of 5 million people, demand for tombs is so high that people are buried between old graves or at the edges of the burial grounds."
So it seems that's where the bodies are buried, Jc - in cemetaries. They just squeeze them in somehow. Dashed cunning, these Iraqis.
We know nothing of cemeteries in Iraq. So it could be a big investigative report for you. Can you think of a good reason not to go?
News reports have limited space - so, for example, IBC reports on 5 August 2007:
60 decomposed bodies found in Baquba;
5 police kidnapped and murdered in sharkat;
1-2 dead in a car bombing in Mahmudiyah;
2 civilians kidnapped and murdered near Riadh;
13 dead in a mortar attack in Baghdad;
1 policeman killed by a roadside bomb near Latifiyah;
18 found dead in Baghdad, probable victims of a death squad.
The media summaries we read, tally up these incidents and come up with a figure like "100 Iraqis killed today".
But these figures are obviously incomplete - for starters, Iraq has been plagued by a massive upsurge in plain old violent crime since the security forces were dissolved - the victims of kidnappings gone wrong; armed robberies and plain old non-political murders. For that matter, there are no insurgent casualties reported at all in those figures.
What proportion of murders makes it to the papers in western countries? In round terms there are 20-30 murders per day in the US, how many of them are reported by the media?
Other than wishful thinking, is there any reason to assume reporting of violent crime in Iraq is more complete than in the west?
I suspect that the incidence of violence follows a power law distribution - there are a small number of massive atrocities which kill hundreds; a somewhat larger number of atrocities which kill dozens and a much, much larger number of killings of individuals or small groups.
'"The morgue was receiving 40-50 bodies per day before and now has received only 20 in the last 48 hours," added the spokesman for Lieutenant General Abboud Gambar, who commands a joint force of Iraqi soldiers and policemen.'
Mind you, this was presented as evidence that the surge is working, after the first four days. So I imagine that things in Iraq must be pretty much pacified by now.
"Anyone know where all the dead people are buried? What about you Ian. Surely the cemeteries in Baghdad must be swelling with hundreds of bodies a day. Are they?"
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4882634.stm
On Friday, 7 April, the BBC News website is asking people across Iraq how they live their lives.
Here, Yousif Abdulla, 42, a gravedigger at Sheikh Muhyadin, the biggest and oldest graveyard in Kirkuk, describes the heartache of burying friends.
...
"In the past three years I have made 600 to 700 graves."
"Many times we refuse customers. Sometimes they come at midnight and ask for gravestones.
But we tell them where the stones are and they can go and take stones themselves."
'I don't like this job any more since big numbers of people are killed everyday and I see them with my eyes."
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/article634194.ece
"FOR 23 years Sheikh Jamal al-Sudani has taken it upon himself to bury the bodies of murdered Iraqis -- men, women and children -- whose families were too afraid to retrieve them from the mortuary slabs of Baghdad.
Until recently they were the victims of Saddam Hussein's pitiless and paranoid regime, which hunted down critics with ruthless efficiency and often dispatched their sons as well to eliminate the risk of revenge.
When Saddam was overthrown three years ago, Sudani thought his workload would ease. But now he is busier than ever and can barely imagine the suffering of those whose grisly remains are being tipped into new mass graves reminiscent of the old tyranny.
In July, which saw the worst sectarian slaughter so far in Baghdad, Sudani collected up to 500 bodies in a single week. There was one particularly dreadful day when he wondered how he would find the strength to carry on."
http://blip.tv/file/114405
Video clip of an interview with a gravedigger in Adamiyah describing how the new cemtery set up in 2003 is now full as they bury 4-5 "martyrs" per day. He goes on to say this is "apart from other people buried elsewhere by their families".
http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=123&art_id=qw109238598…
"Baghdad - Abdullah Hassani is one of the few Iraqis whose business is booming. Victims of gangs, thieves and suicide bombers are filling his cemetery faster than ever.
"We used to get a couple of heart attack victims or the elderly twice a week," said Hassani, the graveyard's caretaker.
"Now we can bury up to 10 people a day. Some are murdered by thieves or gangs. Some are guerrillas fighting the Americans. Some are tortured and then shot in vendettas and lawlessness." "
http://www.dahrjamailiraq.com/hard_news/archives/newscommentary/000381…
"Another group, the People's Kifah, organized hundreds of Iraqi academics and volunteers who conducted a survey in coordination "with grave-diggers across Iraq," and who also "obtained information from hospitals and spoke to thousands of witnesses who saw incidents in which Iraqi civilians were killed by U.S. fire." The project was abandoned when one of their researchers was captured by Kurdish militiamen, handed over to US forces and never seen again. Nevertheless, after less than two months' work, the group documented a minimum of 37,000 violent civilian deaths prior to October 2003."
It's all anecdotal but the people who actually dispose of the bodies all seem to talk about a several-fold increase in burials since the US invasion.
Ian Gould: Long-time readers of Deltoid will recall Seixon's furious insistence that there was no civil warin Iraq
I agree with him, and I have a really good source for that.
That same poll, Lopahkin, shows that one Iraqi in four has had a relative murdered in the past three years. So yeah, it's interesting that the majority don't think they are in a civil war--perhaps the Iraqis who don't think so are the ones who haven't had a relative murdered.
ORB, a British polling group, has just released the results of a poll it took in Iraq in August that suggests that over a million Iraqis have died violently since the US invasion. However, it's important to understand the level of uncertainty involved in the estimate. It is very, very hard to quantify what's happening in a place as chaotic as Iraq.
One measure of the level of uncertainty is that the weighted estimate of violent death is about 50% higher than the raw figures would suggest. ORB asked Iraqis a number of questions, including whether one or more people living under their roof had been killed violently since the invasion. If the sample is randomly chosen, the margin of error should be fairly predictable.
One of the key challenges is a random sample. You can pick phone numbers at random: this works well if almost everyone has a phone, and is equally likely to answer it. If not, you can adjust for the difference between those that answer phones and those that don't, if you can.
Or you can send out polling teams in a way that insures that everyone has about the same chance of being polled. This requires that you have a good idea of who is living where. This can work well under quite bad conditions. If a large share of the population is living in squalid refugee camps, and you have a good idea how many are living in each camp because a relief agency is handing out rations, and the residents have been thoroughly randomized by panicked flight from murderous militias, you can get a good random sample this way, at least for the people in the camps.
Iraq fits neither condition. Having completed their initial survey, ORB concluded they needed to massage the numbers. Did they undersample Baghdad? If so, they should adjust those numbers, assuming they have a good estimate of the current total population, and whether their sample was proportionate to the current population of the neighborhoods they sampled.
There's a dilemma here. If the government is functioning adequately, you don't estimate violent deaths by survey: you ask it to tabulate the corpses in the morgues, or the ration card holders that have stopped eating. On the other hand, if it has lost count of the corpses, then they are probably even less capable of telling you the current population of a specific neighborhood or region net of massive refugee flows.
Massaging polling numbers is a tricky business. Your poll may capture a surprisingly low number of Sunni Arab adult males. This might be sampling error, best dealt with by re-weighting the sample. On the other hand, it may reflect the fact that a large number of the expected Sunni Arab adult males are, in fact, dead. If that's the case, re-weighting the sample will only distort the truth.
Something along those lines seems to be reflected in the recent ORB poll. Looking at the raw, un-weighted responses, 7% of Iraqi Kurds have lost a household member to violence since the invasion, and 6% of those that identify themselves as Shiites. Many Iraqis refused to claim a particular sect for the pollsters, and simply called themselves Muslims. 9% of these lost a household member. This group included some Kurds, and backing those out at the Kurdish death rate suggests that Arabs that identified themselves as "Muslim" rather than a particular sect had a household violent death rate of about 10%. This group includes both Sunni and Shiite Iraqi Arabs.
The group that identified themselves as "Sunni" had a 32% household violent death rate in the un-weighted ORB poll. However, most Kurds are Sunni, but reported much less violence. Backing them out at the average rate of reported violence for Kurds suggests that Sunni Arabs reported household violent death since the invasion at about 38%.
If the poll results are remotely in the right ballpark, Arabs that identify themselves as Sunni are suffering much worse losses than other groups in Iraq: the sort of casualties that knocked Russia and the Central Powers out of World War I, and drove the French army to the edge of mutiny.
Since the poll makes no effort to isolate civilian casualties, one plausible explanation of at least part of the disparity is that Sunni insurgents are being killed in large numbers.
While this poll will be taken by some as confirmation of Burnham et al (2006) published in the Lancet, they do contradict each other in one important sense. According to Burnham et al, Baghdad's level of violence was about average for Iraq. According to ORB, Baghdad is about twice as deadly as Iraq as a whole. The two studies are also not directly equivalent. Burnham et al attempts to measure excess violence as a result of the war. ORB measures all violence since the war, and the number presumably includes some ordinary murders that would have occurred even if there had been no invasion.
CK: They also interviewed a disproportionate share of non-Muslims (only 45% of respondents were "Muslim" overall and 28% percent in Baghdad -- the reset where orthodox, catholic, protestant, etc.). This is weird, but could conceivably push numbers up since religious minorities have been targets of some pretty terrible violence.
I've looked at the tables, and I think you've misunderstood. The category 'Muslim' isn't a summation of the categories 'Sunni Muslim' and 'Shia Muslim', in fact it doesn't equal those two added together; rather, it's a third category which respondents, who didn't want to distinguish themselves as one of the two sects, could choose.
No shit. The point you seem to have missed is the largest of those UN and other surveys still only come to 10% of Lancet's violent deaths estimates.
there are good explanations around for this. the UN survey that you talk about asked MANY questions on different subjects. such things do influence results.
Excercise in what though? You just said you were aware that newspaper counts aren't worth shit when it comes to recording deaths. You now want to use this premise as meaning something though.
a majority of attacks does NOT get reported. of the rest, follow up deads (people dieing of their wounds later) NEVER get reported.
that leaves a minority of a minority of killings reported.
As I said, the death certificates, audited against hospital records, other surveys, none of em can account for where these other dead people are. In fact Lancet was the only source suggesting they exist and nothing else since.
again: death certificates get issued locally, because people NEED them! (widows, etc!) but noone is paasing them along buroucratic lines, beacuse nobody cares!
Think it through nimrod, whether an ambulance is used or a car the destination where the records are kept is the same.
no ambulance, but serious bookkeeping? sounds VERY reasonable to me....
Likewise, I'm sure you won't be recommending me to read what the Lancet authors wrote on why nobody can find 9/10 of everyone killed in Iraq, because nobody has ever written an explanation this. That's why the Pulitzer for that story hasn't been awarded yet.
Roberts did research on the subject of civil war death estimates. i guess you didn t. generally, it s considered to do some READING on people, s work, before we start attacking them...
While this poll will be taken by some as confirmation of Burnham et al (2006) published in the Lancet, they do contradict each other in one important sense. According to Burnham et al, Baghdad's level of violence was about average for Iraq. According to ORB, Baghdad is about twice as deadly as Iraq as a whole.
nice one. but MEANWHILE security situation in Baghdad has deteriorated in a way, that the US was forced to send an additional 30000 troops there!
think about it...
will Maclean wrote:
"However, most Kurds are Sunni, but reported much less violence."
Kurdistan is mostly peaceful, except at its fringes where there is an incipient civil war with Arab Iraqis over oil rich regions around Kirkuk. Saddam's writ did not run in the region since the establishment of the no-fly zone in the early 90's. The region has a stable civic society and the best armed forces in Iraq, though the Kurds do not seem very eager to send them in battle in places like Anbar and Basra. So low death rates for Kurdish Sunnis is entirely consistent, in fact an equal death rate for Kurdish Sunnis and Sunnis in the rest of Iraq would be an infallible sign that the poll is highly suspect. But it is not; at least not for that reason.
High death rates for Sunnis in the rest of Iraq is also consistent, as they are the target of Shia death squads around Baghdad, and there is an inter-Sunni civil war in Anbar. They are also the weakest of the three main ethnic groups. As far as we know, most of the refugees in Syria and Jordan are Sunni.
The difference about Baghdad rates is a strike against the ORB poll. I am more inclined the accept the Johns Hopkins/ Lancet figures.
Donald Johnson wrote:
"So the fallback position is that either the respondents lied, the pollsters lied, or they did a really amazingly poor job picking out their sample."
I'm not sure these are the only possible problem areas.
The first two are a very real possibility. There doesn't seem to be any kind of things about this poll that would mitigate against this. Often surveys use techniques to squelch this possibility, or at least minimize it. They have another team do repeat interviews with the respondents, they tell the interviewers in advance that their work will be checked, or at least spot-checked..etc. This is the desired practice afaik, and is supposed to help prevent false reports or interviewers making up data. The question in this poll is so charged a political football that anyone or everyone involved may have very strong interests in manipulating its outcome. If there's any poll where those kind of error checking techniques are crucial, this one would stand out more than just about any other.
On their sample picking, if they oversampled violent areas or cities this could have a big effect. The margin of error they present seems preposterously small too. That's the kind of ranges opinion polls usually present, though creating a mortality estimate seems a bit more complex than just saying what percentage of 1,000 people said what in an opinion poll.
Another issue is whether the question phrasing things as 'household' actually was effective at preventing people from including extended family members, cousins who maybe stayed there once in a while, etc. Again, polls often help do this by taking down detailed records of household members. This makes it clear to respondents that the poll is serious about tracking one household, and that deaths they report will have to match the detailed household list. The first impulse when this question comes up is probably to report whatever the family war story happens to be, whether strictly 'household' based or not. It would seem pretty easy to ignore the request in the question to speak only about 'household' or take a very loose interpretation of that to still report what would be the impulse to report. More detailed interviews which define household clearly and have more questions about the household composition help prevent this I think.
There can also be issues of interpretation of data here. I'm not sure how swift ORB is in the issues of estimating mortality rates. There seems to be a lot of stuff going on with 'weighting' here that can hugely change the estimates, and which might be questionable and speculative. Maybe some experts who know about this kind of thing will address this in detail, if any take this poll seriously enough to devote extensive time to analyzing it, that is.
A quick back-of-the-envelope calculation:
Baghdad had a pre-war population of around 5 million. Assuming a prewar death rate of 5/1,000, that's 25,000 deaths a year or 70 deaths a day prewar in Baghdad,
According to the source I cite at Message 79 prewar the central morgue handled around 200 bodies per month or a little under 10% of the total expected mortality for Baghdad.
The lowest figure we've seen from any source for the morgue post-war is 10 per day according to source cited by z at message 84 - and That was described as a drastic fall from the pre-surge numbers.
So at a minimum the Baghdad morgue is now handling 3,650 corpses a year - which is likely to be a radical underestimate for the whole post-war period. That's an increase of around 1,000 per year. If we assume the proportion of bodies processed at the central morgue has stayed constant, then there's an additional 10,000 deaths per year in Baghdad.
If we use the pre-surge figure of 50 corpses per day, we're talking about an additional 15,000 corpses at the central morgue. I know I'm piling supposition upon supposition here
but if we assume a constant 10% of deaths in Baghdad make it to the morgue that's 150,000 addition deaths per annum in Baghdad.
We're starting to get into the same neighbourhood as the Lancet and ORB figures.
Oh and let's note that the Lancet critics keep insisting that the estimated pre-war mortality of 5 per thousand is too low. In that case, the percentage of Baghdad's total dead received at the morgue goes down to less than 10% and the scaling factor to go from the morgue deaths to total deaths goes up.
And how do you get from "aren't hiding it that well" to "are making weekly killcounts available to the media?" Do the death squads thoughtfully put a "Corpse #XXXX" tag on each body so reporters can be sure they aren't missing any?
Do you have any reason at all to think that either the central government, or the international media, are tallying up the majority of the killings? Other than "Nobody's trying to hide them very well, so it should be possible to find out about them?"
Re:
"I haven't heard anything about police abducting whole families of sunnis in the middle of the night and dumping their bodies in public, in groups, complete with torture wounds, gunshot wounds to the head and police issue handcuffs.
Have you?"
Well, yes I have (except maybe for the handcuffs). Take a look at:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6034975.stm
The reports states that Iraqi police have been accused of co-operating with Shia militiamen in carrying out sectarian attacks. If you look for more detail on the web, you will find it.
You should also read the "seven sergeants" piece in the NYT where they state that the Iraqi police and army help to organize attacks on US forces.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4719252.stm
Try this for an account of a police death squad.
Toby, kilo was being sarcastic; he agrees that death squads exist. He's saying that they aren't working very hard to cover their tracks, so the official and newspaper-derived body counts should accurately capture the number of people they've killed. I'm not sure how one follows from the other, but there you go.
Anton wrote:
"[Kilo] agrees that death squads exist. He's saying that they aren't working very hard to cover their tracks, so the official and newspaper-derived body counts should accurately capture the number of people they've killed. I'm not sure how one follows from the other, but there you go."
Kilo has a very poor appreciation of life in Iraq if he thinks every death makes the evening news, or even the back pages of the newspapers, and if he thinks the police are like the NYPD. Let him look for reporting from the interior of Anbar; he will find little or no eye-witness or even secondhand accounts of what is going on.
Presumably, he believes there is a newpaper or website called the "Anbar Gazette" that is reporting daily body counts.
BTW, Muslim custom is that burial takes place before sundown on the day of death. If you had a dead relative and you feared more death squads were in waiting between you and the morgue, what would you do?
Correct. Merely to point out that the one party doing this on a huge scale and who would have the most motivation to make people disappear, isn't.
I wasn't saying this makes newspaper reports accurate. I was saying that this is how much government employees carrying out genocide give a shit about the bodies being found, even with identifying evidence.
So when it comes to the question of WhoTF is killing the 90% of unrecorded dead, you're still short a suspect, along with the bodies of course.
The very simple concept I'm trying to get someone to appreciate here is that according to that Lancet 2 estimate, when it comes to violent deaths in Iraq, the US troops, the Shiia death squads operating out of police and interior ministries and the Sunni car and suicide bombers don't count for shit.
They are, collectively, a bunch of pussies.
In fact, every killing you have ever heard of in Iraq is quite irrelevant.
Because apparently for everyone they've killed that's been recorded by any means, theres 9 more killed by some other means by someone else that you've never heard of.
Are we getting the point here?
Everything written to date is like reading about just the left-handed victims of violence in Iraq. Or just the gays. 10%. Can you fucking imagine ?
Pointing this out doesn't mean I have less appreciation for life (suck my balls, the pissant who said that) nor do you have any more appreciation for it by pretending to buy this BS while not actually having enough faith in it to state so.
If you believe it, they say it.
Better yet, fkn write it.
Same Pulitzer prize waiting for the first reporter anywhere on planet earth who discovers that everything written about violence in Iraq to date has been dealing with 1/10th of those actually killed, and nobody has yet discovered the story of what happened to the other 9/10ths.
There's a dozen different angles to it as well. You could get a year's worth of award winning articles out of it.
An extra 700+ killed violently every day of the week. About 5 times more than you ever hear about on the worst day with coordinated bombings of markets. All you've got to do is find out where the fuck this is happening and write about it.
Little to no reporting of violence in al Anbar? Is that supposed to be funny?
WTF are we supposed to assume the news reports from there along with the police, hospital and coalition reports of violence are then ? Fake ?
Come to think of it how could AFP, a French news agency, possibly be reporting from Iraq, a Middle Eastern country. For that to be possible they'd have to have employ some kind of "reporting people" to go to an area where their newspaper headquarters weren't located and send reports back.
What a ridiculous concept eh.
WTF you think the odds are that the Arab press you can read daily on Juan Cole and Iraq slogger have reporters in one particular Arab country that's been making rather a lot of news for the past 4 years, and that when they file reports from these provinces, they're actually there rather than lying nimrod ?
What were you thinking, that after 5 years nobody was translating the Arab press yet?
Kilo,
One gets the impression that you are ignoring the fact that is very difficult to report from Iraq. Mosey on upthread and contmplate how difficult it must be to report on deaths in Iraq from a bunker from which you cannot leave.
Also, you are still using argument from personal incredulity.
I wonder if the fact that Iraq is the bloodiest conflict ever for journalists would have an effect on the underreporting of deaths. Your take?
So kilo, what percentage of the deaths in the DRC and Darfur and the Bosnian and Lebanese civil wars do you think made it into the western press on a day-to-day basis?
Kilo,
Dawhuh? So if some of the deaths caused by a given group have been officially recorded by the central government or mass media, then all of them must have been recorded, and therefore any unrecorded deaths must have been done by a completely different group? Is this really your argument?
Hey, I once saw a cat catch a mouse, and the cat didn't seem to care that I was looking! Therefore, any mouse mortality which occurs out of my sight was done by, probably, ninjas.
And as for "along with the bodies"...look upthread at the graveyard descriptions. Can you find us any evidence that the number of dead bodies piling up in Iraq is too low to fit this survey?
Setting aside the shrieking, there seem to be several separate arguments all lumped together in kilo's pov--
1. The press should be able to count most of the deaths-- Clearly ridiculous if he means reporters should personally check up on every violent incident, or even a large fraction of them. Even the numbers we actually do see are mostly numbers collected by some other group, like the Iraqi Ministry of Health.
2. The insurgents or the Arab press should be reporting all these unreported deaths--Arab reporters probably face the same dangers anyone else faces. Unless they're on every street corner reporting their observations to one central collecting agency, they can't do the job either. I'm not sure about the various insurgent groups--do any of them report regularly on deaths? Of course, there have been at least two cases where Iraqi organizations reported death tolls much higher than IBC figures.
3. Where are all the bodies?--- Probably buried. It's odd that kilo thinks this is an argument. The anecdotal evidence suggests there is a huge increase in gravedigging, which is more consistent (on an impressionistic level) with Lancet numbers than IBC numbers.
4. And in general, the violence level couldn't be that high or I'd sense it from news reports--My own sense about the news reports is that they give contradictory vibes. Literally tens of thousands of US casualties (nearly 4000 dead) and very little sense of how many Iraqi casualties they've inflicted in return. According to IBC US forces kill several hundred civilians per year in the past two years, which is an astonishingly low figure given how many US casualties there have been. (How many casualties have there been in the IDF during the period in which they've killed a couple thousand Palestinian civilians and wounded tens of thousands? Not anywhere near that number, I'm sure, though I don't have the number handy.) And there is a sense that Iraq is literally disintegrating in front of us, when according to IBC figures the death toll over the past 4 years is considerably smaller than the toll during the Iraq/Iran war and perhaps smaller than the toll Saddam inflicted just in a few months in 1991 while putting down Kurdish and Shiite revolts. To use kilo's own style of argument, these past few years should just seem mildly unpleasant compared to some periods under Saddam.
I actually have some sympathy with kilo's argument from personal incredulity and don't have a strong feeling about where the truth lies, but that's what I find unconvincing about kilo's argument--he does have a strong sense, I gather, that the press is counting most of the deaths. But there's lots of space between IBC and Lancet2, and no strong reason to believe the press is counting most of the deaths even if you don't think the true number is ten times higher.
Here's Btselem's table of statistics for deaths in the second intifada--roughly speaking, there've been a few hundred IDF deaths as opposed to over 2000 Palestinian civilian deaths inflicted by the IDF.
My impression is that this is typical in guerilla wars. It seems pretty unusual for an occupying force in a given year to be suffering as many or more casualties than it inflicts on the civilian population, but that's what you'd believe is true in Iraq if you think the press is catching most of them.
http://www.btselem.org/english/statistics/Casualties.asp
90 Iraqi journalists have died in the conflict, compared with 23 western journalists.
Because apparently for everyone they've killed that's been recorded by any means, theres 9 more killed by some other means by someone else that you've never heard of.
from my daily lecture of the washington post, i got the feeling that car accidents are a RARE phanomenon.
they happen about once a week, and are big things, involving lots of cars. and somehow the WaPo seems to have missed, when that backward moving truck knocked in the door of my friends car.
Regarding Donald Johnson's posts (104, 105), I think they are good but perhaps not fully understanding the wars that are being fought in Iraq.
Yes, wars because besides the Coalition/ Insurgent war, there are at least 4 others: a Sunni-Sunni war in Anbar, a Sunnia-Shia war in Baghdad and its environs, a Shia-Shia war in the south, and a Kurd-Arab war in the north. It is the multiple clashes and accompanying ethnic cleansing that is producing the high casualty figures.
Ethnic cleansing is probably the worst form of war since it targets civilians explicitly - men, women and children. And because ethnic cleansing is so total - we are talking about whole villages wiped out and survivors put to flight, there are few left around to tell the tale, particularly no cameramen and reporters. Think maybe two or three Darfurs in the interior of Iraq.
Why else would millions flee their homes which were safe under Saddam?
Stop thinking US soldiers killing Iraqis: this is Iraqis killing Iraqis. The resemblance is to Yugoslavia after Tito died. Once the central power of the dictator has been removed, the country that was once held together by force tends to disintegrate. Iraq would have had to face the post-Saddam future sooner or later. George W. Bush ensured they have to face it in the worst possible circumstances.
I understand that, Toby, but actually, it's not clearly true if you take the Lancet2 report at face value, where at least 31 percent (ignoring error bars) of the violent deaths were caused by coalition forces.
That aside, as an American one of my obsessions is finding out how much of the violence our forces cause in Iraq. The issue is almost invisible. It's taken for granted that US forces suppress violence--I'd like to know how much violence they inflict in suppressing it, but it's virtually impossible to tell (unless you accept L2's numbers on this.)
Donald, I do generally accept the Lancet/ Johns Hopkins figures and 31% due to "coalition" forces is probably right. 69% is still saying the majority of casualties are being caused by other players in the manifold wars that are going on, not to mention the multidude of criminal gangs kidnapping, looting, extorting and murdering.
For example, in the Sunni-Sunni war Arbar war one of the sides is "ours". That is, they accept US money and assistance, though stopping short of acknowledging the sovereignty of the Baghdad government. I have no doubt air power is one of the sorts of assistance being provided. That surely is one reason most of the refugees in Jordan and Syria are Sunni.
Boris to Kilo:
"Also, you are still using argument from personal incredulity."
Well on a science blog I think the argument from skeptical incredulity sure beats the argument from personal credulity - after all there are more than few comments in thsi thread along the lines of "Well this sounds right", or "Seems high but I don't have any problem believing it".
Things are very very bad in Iraq, and perhaps if stability returns there may be some true accounting of how high the toll has been - but the chances are that as in Cambodia, Rwanda and even Bosnia, and in fact most episodes of mass mortality cause by violence or oppression even when peace is re-established establishing the toll of war is hard to do with precision - and high to low range estimates of most of these episodes differ by as much as 50%. But that is not an excuse for the sort of reckless number mongering engaged in by L1, L2 and now this poll - there have been a number of other attempts to get a handle on the magnitude of what is happening - and although they differ between each other they lie roughly within that 50% range of each other that seems to correspond to what other methods of data collection - compromised as they are - report as well. These lancet and now ORB poll are about a factor of ten greater, and as Kilo has pointed out this is a really huge event to have been missed or unoticed. And look - someone who thinks that the casualties in Iraq from violence over the past three years might plausibly number from 90k to 250k based upon IBC, UN, ABC and Helth ministry reports with some assumptions about their shortcomings thrown in - that someone is not "trying to minimise" the casualties to sanitise the war - 100k dead is not "minimal".
Johan W: 100k dead is not "minimal".
As you pointed out, this is a science blog. Would it be too much to ask that you learn what the words "minimize" and "minimal" actually mean in a scientific context before you sound off? If 100k deaths isn't minimal, what do you consider the minimum to be? Do you really think it is plausible that the true number is actually lower?
The figures published by the MoH and others are not "attempts to get a handle on the magnitude of what is happening". At best they are attempts to quantify certified deaths using a system which has broken down, as even the Minister of Health has acknowledged.
So you think that the JHU mortality studies involve "reckless number mongering" do you? Have you any evidence whatever for that claim or are you just another windbag trying to pass himself off as a statistician?
These survey results may or may not be skewed, I don't know.
There's a simple solution to this debate: The dead and dying find themselves in a few predictable places: A morgue, a hospital, a mosque, a church, a crematorium or a graveyard. That would seem a good sanity check, looking for the rate of funerals, burials & cremations across the pre-war and post-war periods.
I might believe the refugee problem could swing the stats either way, maybe come up zero-sum.
Or could it be that expatriated Iraqis are those who could afford to get out & saved most of their kin, leaving behind a slightly smaller population with an apparently increased death rate? Maybe the study authors considered this, I don't know.
I don't doubt the intentions or the analysis, but data can get skewed despite the best of practices. But by 9:1 (mentioned above), probably not. That'd be one helluva a data skew. If we take the previous JH/Lancet study on face value w/ the 650k dead & compare it to the 1,200k dead in this study, wouldn't we be seeing evidence of a genocidal campaign elsewhere? This does seem at odds with media reports and general perception.
Maybe there is a refugee problem that is skewing the results?
Here's a link regarding deaths of journalists in Iraq--
[link](http://electroniciraq.net/news/themedia/Media_Worker_Death_Toll_Reaches…)
One thing I found interesting is that most of the deaths occur in or near Baghdad. So either the rest of Iraq is less dangerous for journalists, or there just aren't that many journalists to kill outside of Baghdad.