NYT: Iraqi Dead May Total 600,000, Study Says

Absolutely staggering and devastating.

The New York Times reports this jaw-dropping figure that is the result of a study larger than the Lancet's previous sampling methods that had earlier estimated the number of Iraqi deaths since the beginning of the Iraq war to be in the range of 100,000 - a figure that was widely disputed and denied by the Bush administration at the time.

It is the second study by researchers from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. It uses samples of casualties from Iraqi households to extrapolate an overall figure of 601,027 Iraqis dead from violence between March 2003 and July 2006.

The findings of the previous study, published in The Lancet, a British medical journal, in 2004, had been criticized as high, in part because of its relatively narrow sampling of about 1,000 families, and because it carried a large margin of error.

The new study is more representative, its researchers said, and the sampling is broader: it surveyed 1,849 Iraqi families in 47 different neighborhoods across Iraq. The selection of geographical areas in 18 regions across Iraq was based on population size, not on the level of violence, they said.
[...]
The study uses a method similar to that employed in estimates of casualty figures in other conflict areas such as Darfur and Congo. It sought to measure the number of deaths that occurred as a result of the war.

It argues that absolute numbers dead, such as morgue figures, could not give a full picture of the “burden of conflict on an entire population,” because they were often incomplete.

The mortality rate before the American invasion was about 5.5 people per 1,000 per year, the study found. That rate rose to 19.8 deaths per 1,000 people in the year ending in June.

With daily reports of scores of bodies being found all over Iraq - most having been victims of vicious torture - it's not that difficult to assume that the actual death toll is far higher than the Pentagon has been willing to admit and while media reports can only rely on official Iraqi government agency counts since journalists are basically retsricted to reporting from the green zone, we in the west certainly can't know exactly what is happening around the country on any given day and perhaps we never will.