Toll

Quoting a kill ratio of 1 to 9 (from a report by Pat Murphy on Geopolitics, and the impact of modern colonialism), I suggested that the number of Non US people dead in Iraq are likely to be around 180 000.
That's actually an error, and oughtt to be 18 000. (2000 x 9 = 18 000). Here's an offical media report. The report shows an actual minimum kill ratio of about 1:15. Remember that on almost a daily basis we hear of a dozen Iraqi's being blown up. I believe though that the correct figure is beyond 100 000. I wonder why the US military feel they must keep the actual figure secret. Surely they'd feel they have 'bragging rights' the higher their tally? The fact of the matter is their own population would not condone such a high killing rate. It's only in America where 1 US life = 15 x (Non US)Expendables or more. See any Hollywood action movie for details.

Iraqi Death Toll Much Higher Than U.S.

By JIM KRANE, Associated Press Writer 2 hours, 23 minutes ago

The number of Iraqis who have died violently since the U.S.-led invasion is many times larger than the U.S. military death toll of 2,000 in
Iraq. In one sign of the enormity of the Iraqi loss, at least 3,870 were killed in the past six months alone, according to an Associated Press count.

One U.S. military spokesman said it is possible the figure for the entire war could be 30,000 Iraqis, which many experts see as a credible estimate. Others suspect the number is far higher, since the chaos in Iraq leaves the potential for many killings to go unreported.

The losses are far larger than most analysts and
Pentagon planners expected before the war and mean Iraqi civilians are bearing most of the suffering.

"We may never know the true number of the Iraqi public that has been killed or injured in this war," said the U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad, Lt. Col. Steve Boylan. "The Iraqi public has taken the brunt of the casualties."

Every day claims more victims: A car bomb targeting American troops that kills Iraqi passers-by. An insurgent attack on a police station. Sectarian militias dumping blindfolded corpses in the Euphrates River.

Civilians made up more than two-thirds of the Iraqis killed in war-related violence since the country's first elected government took power on April 28, according to the AP count. The rest were Iraqi security personnel.

Boylan said the U.S. military keeps its own tally of Iraqi dead, but does not release it. He said he had asked U.S. authorities to see the estimates of Iraqi dead himself, and was refused.

But he suggested an estimate from Iraq Body Count, a British anti-war group that has compiled a death toll based on media reports, appeared credible. The group estimated that from 26,690 to 30,051 Iraqi civilians were killed, or roughly 1,000 per month in the 30 months since the war began.

"I guess it is certainly possible given some of the spectacular events, but hard to say," Boylan said via e-mail.

Some outside experts call that number about right.

Judith Yaphe, a former
CIA Iraq analyst and a senior fellow at National Defense University, said she accepts estimates of 20,000 to 30,000 killed.

Anthony Cordesman, a military analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said in a report issued Friday that the Iraq Body Count figure of about 30,000 Iraqis killed was "extremely uncertain" — but that it did seem the best estimate available.

Iraq Body Count's figures include Iraqi civilians killed by U.S. forces as well as by insurgents and militia. They also include homicides stemming from the breakdown in law and order.

The AP's count is based on reports from police, hospitals, government officials and eyewitnesses. The death toll includes Iraqi police and military — but not insurgents, victims of ordinary homicides or the nearly 1,000 Shiite pilgrims killed August 21 in a bridge stampede after someone shouted a suicide bomber was in the crowd.

There is no way of knowing how many deaths go uncounted, especially in areas too remote or dangerous to visit.

Estimates from other experts who measure overall Iraqi deaths, including insurgents and Iraqi troops, range higher than 30,000.

Michael O'Hanlon, a military analyst at the Brookings Institution who has closely followed the war's casualties, said an average of 1,500 to 2,000 Iraqis have been killed per month, about half of them insurgents.

While American troops are killed at the rate of about 60 to 70 per month, the new Iraqi military suffers that many deaths in a week, mainly from insurgent attacks that rose to about 90 per day in September, O'Hanlon said.

Exacerbating the carnage is the Iraqi crime rate, now the highest in the Middle East, with about 10,000 homicides a year that would not have happened without the invasion, he said.

The total of Iraqi deaths — including insurgents — from all manner of war-related violence could run as high as 70,000, said O'Hanlon, who teaches a course at Columbia University on estimating war casualties.

"These numbers matter a lot," O'Hanlon said. "They matter in humanitarian terms. And they fuel the insurgency, because the perception and sometimes the reality is that we haven't done enough to protect innocent Iraqi lives."

One effort to count deaths, a study published in the Lancet medical journal last October, estimated that 98,000 more civilians died in Iraq since March 2003 than would otherwise have been expected. Many experts were skeptical of those findings, which were based on extrapolations.

As high as it is, the Iraqi death rate so far is much lower than that of the Vietnamese during the 1954-1976 Vietnam War, when about 1.1 million Vietnamese fighters and some 2 million civilians were killed — a rough average of 12,000 per month.

The Pentagon made it clear from the start of the Iraq invasion that it would not be counting Iraqi bodies, perhaps a reaction to the enduring embarrassment from its inflating Vietnam War body counts to demonstrate U.S. success in the battlefield.

John Sloboda, the director of Iraq Body Count, said the counting is left to volunteers like him, scouring the news for reports of Iraqis killed. He believes his own group's count is low.

News organizations have periodically tried to gauge the toll. A 2003 AP survey of records in large Iraqi hospitals found at least 3,240 civilians had been killed in the war's first month.

Responsibility for the tally now belongs to the Iraqi government and not the U.S. military, said Boylan.

But Iraqi government statistics have mainly covered those killed by insurgents, not by U.S. or Iraqi troops. Sloboda said government figures were consistently lower than his media-based estimates.

Whatever the figure, the rate of killing appears to be growing.