WS MoreOrLess: Counting the Dead in Iraq
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This is the short edition of More or Less, first broadcast on the BBC World Service.
Hello and welcome to More or Less on the BBC World Service. I'm Tim Harford. This week we ask an Australian comedian to explain the system of imperial measurements. But first, I'm afraid we have more serious statistics to discuss. The United Nations recently announced that in 2013 almost 8,000 civilians and 1,000 members of the security forces had been killed in Iraq. In Estimates of how many people died overall since 2003 when Saddam Hussein was deposed vary widely. A website called Iraq Body Count gives a figure of 120,000. The campaigning journalist John Pilger recently cited a number of a million. We've looked at the difficulties of counting war dead before. Many deaths will certainly go unreported, while others may be counted twice.
But even so, the range of uncertainty in the case of Iraq seems to be very wide indeed. So I spoke to Dr Glenn Rangwala from Cambridge University in the United Kingdom to guide us through the numbers.
Some people are just counting the immediate victims of acts of violence. They just tally the number of death reports that come in from morgues and police stations and from journalists. that are attributing deaths to violent conflict and generally come to something in the range of 120,000 people up to the present day. However, not all deaths that occur in a conflict are caused by immediate acts of violence. So how do we try and record those deaths? What a number of organisations and institutes have tried to do have been to do a sample-based survey within Iraq. So they've asked households whether any members who were resident ordinarily at that household have died, and then they've extrapolated from that
to a crude death rate in the country. So how many people per thousand per year are dying in Iraq? And I've compared that to the pre-invasion death rate. So probably the most famous study was one conducted by Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in 2006, which found that 655,000, what are called in the terminology excess deaths, have occurred in Iraq in that period of three, just three and a half years.
Was it reasonable for John Pilger to say that a million people had died in Iraq as a result of American and British involvement?
John Pilger was drawing upon a series of polls conducted by a London-based organisation called Opinion Research Business, which conducted these polls in Iraq, asking people if any of their family members had died from violent causes. And extrapolating from that, they came to a figure firstly of 1.2 million, later 1 million deaths in Iraq. Unfortunately, that organisation I don't think has produced the most reliable study. There have been five other studies of much greater detail. That said, all those different analyses since 2003 conducted by established researchers have themselves come to different estimates.
How do official violent-death tallies like Iraq Body Count arrive at ~120,000 deaths?
anywhere between 405,000 to the 655,000 in 2006 by the Johns Hopkins team.
Glenn Rangwala. In short, there are two ways to count the dead in Iraq. You can try to tot up the violent deaths, a method which produces a stark total of around 100 or 120,000, or you can try to compare some broader measure of the overall death rate with what that death rate used to be before the war, and that suggests perhaps half a million deaths, with a considerable margin of error.
The
When we were researching this item, we were pretty stunned by this number of a million that had been circulating. It got our reporter, Charlotte MacDonald, thinking.
Yeah, the thing that got me is that a million people is such a big number. That's more than half the population of Northern Ireland, a fifth of the population of Norway.
And even if a better estimate is, say, 400,000 deaths, according to Glenn Rangwala, you would expect that kind of death toll, that scale, to have a huge impact on Iraq's demographics.
Exactly, and loads of Iraqis have left the country to seek refuge elsewhere. So I expected that the population would have fallen sharply.
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