100,000 Iraqis Dead in War?

Around 100,000 Iraqis have been killed in violence since the US-led coalition forces invaded the country in March 2003, said a report published Friday in British medicine journal The Lancet.

More than half of those who died were women and children killed in air strikes, American public health experts said in the latest issue of the magazine.

The study, which was carried out in 33 randomly chosen neighborhoods of Iraq representative of the entire population, shows that violence is now the leading cause of death in Iraq.

More here.

UPDATE: Tim Worstall at Tech Central Station questions the accuracy of the report here.

UPDATE II: Juan Cole also comments here:

The methodology of this study is very tight, but it does involve extrapolating from a small number and so could easily be substantially incorrect. But the methodology also is standard in such situations and was used in Bosnia and Kosovo.

I think the results are probably an exaggeration. But they can’t be so radically far off that the 16,000 deaths previously estimated can still be viewed as valid. I’d say we have to now revise the number up to at least many tens of thousand–which anyway makes sense. The 16,000 estimate comes from counting all deaths reported in the Western press, which everyone always knew was only a fraction of the true total. (I see deaths reported in al-Zaman every day that don’t show up in the Western wire services).

The most important finding from my point of view is not the magnitude of civilian deaths, but the method of them. Roberts and Burnham find that US aerial bombardments are killing far more Iraqi civilians than had previously been suspected. This finding is also not a surprise to me. I can remember how, on a single day (August 12), US warplanes bombed the southern Shiite city of Kut, killing 84 persons, mainly civilians, in an attempt to get at Mahdi Army militiamen. These deaths were not widely reported in the US press, especially television. Kut is a small place and has been relatively quiet except when the US has been attacking Muqtada al-Sadr, who is popular among some segments of the population there. The toll in Sadr City or the Shiite slums of East Baghdad, or Najaf, or in al-Anbar province, must be enormous.