Counting the dead. The Iraq Body Count.

Author: Andrew Lawless

 

"The real issue is not whether the Lancet figures were right, or whether we were right. The real issue is why are the British and American governments not doing this themselves?", questions John Sloboda, one of the founders of the Iraq Body Count (IBC). "Why are they leaving it to small underfunded studies, volunteers and academics. It's not the job of volunteers [laughs resignedly], it's the job of Government, and we feel there must be some kind of change to international law, to make it a requirement on warring parties that they report on the civilian casualties that the conflict causes, to an international body such as the United Nations Security Council. Indeed, many people are surprised and horrified to find that there is no requirement under international law for warring parties to estimate the people that they've killed. All there is is a very vague statement that they must do all in their power to protect civilian life, and of course, like a mantra, the US and UK governments constantly repeat that they do do all in their power, but in fact the test of whether they have done all in their power remains in the numbers killed, and that is something that they refuse to engage with."

In a detailed dossier, analysing two years worth of information collected by the organisation, there are plenty of gruesome figures with which the US and UK Governments, and their allies such as Italy, morally need to engage with.

For example:

• US led forces, to date, have killed at least 9,270 civilians, or 37% of the total number of civilian deaths recorded by the IBC;
• Of the 42,500 civilian injuries recorded by the IBC, at least 21,000, or almost 50% were caused by US led forces.

"We felt that two years was a sufficient sample, which allowed month by month trends, year on year comparisons, to publish a cumulative report on everything we knew at this point in time," explains Sloboda of the timing of the report. It is the detail, and comparisons that make the report startling reading, because Sloboda is the first to admit that the figures are not definitive: "We've never claimed that our figures are the complete picture. They are, however, we believe, a representative picture, and the important thing is that these are absolutely certain figures. These are deaths we know have happened. We have very high grade information about the place, the time, often the identity of the victime, the weapons used, and who pulled the trigger, and it's on the basis of that information, statistically analysed, over nearly 25,000 deaths that we're able to produce this quite unique information about breakdowns, trends, proportions of males, women, children killed, of people killed by different weaponry which holds true regardless of whether this is a complete breakdown or not. All these people who keep harping on that this is not a complete count are missing the point. Of course, we want a complete count too, but the only way to get a complete count is to do a door to door census of every house in Iraq."

Methodology

It's important to discuss the Iraq Body Count's methodology. It is by no means uncontroversial. In their regularly updated figures, which are displayed on up to an estimated 70,000 websites (including Three Monkeys Online), the figures which record the amount of civilians killed in the conflict include those killed by insurgents/terrorists and common criminals. While organisations like Fox news have suggested some hidden bias, the IBC are clear and open about their criteria for including civilan deaths caused by non-US forces in their count, which is described as providing an insight into the human consequences of the US led invasion. "The issue is this, that none of these deaths would have occured were it not for the invasion, therefore in a sense all these deaths become the responsibility of those who took the decision to invade. Of course others have a responsibility too, but the point is that the US and UK can't evade responsibility for the increased criminality which is the result of the invasion leading to a break down in law and order. They cannot evade responsibility for the deaths caused by an insurgency which would not have started but for their invasion."

Surely, though, to include civilians killed by suicide bombs, along with those killed directly by US led forces is to confuse the issue? "Not at all, - responds Sloboda, uncompromisingly, - it actually strengthens it, because it shows the entire picture. I don't think that a grieving mother is that concerned as to whether the bullet that killed her son were an insurgent's bullet or that of an American soldier. It's important to get a complete picture of the deaths".

The methodology used by the Iraq Body Count, explained in detail on their site, is based on that employed by Professor Marc Herold, and relies upon media reports from the conflict. Member of the Iraq Body Count team, daily, go through media reports of casualties in the conflict, extracting information that satisfies the following criteria: a) it comes from a reputable media source, as defined by the IBC (both al Jazeera and Fox News have been used, and according to Sloboda "the vast majority of our sources, at the end of the day, turned out to be US sources, so accusations of an anti-US bias really can't be upheld), and b) their sources are widely cited and referenced by other sources. "In other words, we're relying on the inter-relatedness of the world's press and media, and their professionalism to weed out rogue stories. The other thing is that we don't publish any incident unless two independent press sources report the same number of deaths. That allows us to exclude some of the wild or misreported claims that are sometimes put up on some of the more extreme web sites but which don't get picked up by other reputable media."

As such, it's important to emphasise that while the figures reported by the IBC are verified, they do not represent the total number of civilian casualties killed to date in the conflict in Iraq, which one must conclude is higher as the media's ability to effectively report all casualties in Iraq is hampered by the ongoing violence. One of the most common questions Sloboda is faced with is how their work relates to that of the study produced by the medical journal The Lancet. It "used a very different methodology to us. They surveyed nearly one thousand households, randomly chosen all over Iraq, and asked those households how many people they'd lost. They then multiplied through by a factor to provide an estimate for the whole of Iraq. Like an opinion poll, there's always a margin of error in such work, and the smaller the sample the greater the margin of error. The margin of error in their report, and they didn't hide this fact in any way, was 8,000 in the lower bound and 200,000 in the upper bound. 100,000 is the midpoint of that, and hence the figure." Another similar, but larger, study carried out by the United Nations Development Council falls into the same category."You can't directly compare their work with ours. For a start, the periods were different. They were carried out last summer, and cover a smaller period of time than ours. Also, their studies made no distinction between civilian and combatant deaths, whereas our study has been very, very careful to exclude any individual that were clearly identified as combatants.

And how does the IBC define combatants? "We take a moral rather than a legal view of combatants. Anyone who initiates deadly violence and kills, or attempts to kill someone, without being provoked or acting in self defence, is seen by us as a combatant. Whether they have an official military status or not. So, for example, all suicide bombers would be considered, by us, to be combatants. Also when there are deaths including a suicide bomber, we always subtract that one, or however many bombers were involved, from the total before publishing it."

Smart Bombs and Hi-Tech war

The first gulf war in 1991 introduced the world to the concept of the hi-tech war, where reporters could look out their windows to see cruise missiles turning corners for high precision strikes. A decade later, in this new era of warfare, as one commentator trumpeted after the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, "by using JDAM and other guided weapons, planners could designate air strikes against urban targets that otherwise would have been off-limits for fear of collateral damage. The ability to dismantle the Iraqi regime building by building had a powerful effect on the enemy".

It's a view presumably shared by President Bush, who in May of this year, when addressing graduating midshipmen at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, said: "In this new era of warfare, we can target a regime, not a nation, and that means terrorists and tyrants can no longer feel safe hiding behind innocent life. In the 21st century, we can target the guilty and protect the innocent, and that makes it easier to keep the peace".

It's worth quoting at length the dossier's notes on the figures relating to children killed, and by what weaponry:

"If it is assumed that adults, not children, are the intended targets in war, the proportion of children to adults killed by different types of weaponry can be used as a measure of their indiscriminateness. ‘Precision’ and high-power, hightechnology weaponry cause a higher ratio of child-to-adult deaths than relatively primitive devices such as handheld firearms and manually-triggered roadside bombs. It appears that whatever their military advantages and benefit to soldiers, ‘stand-off’ weapons which put a substantial distance between soldiers and their intended targets are the most likely to cause unintended harm to bystanders. Lowest in ‘child lethality’ were handheld firearms, which suggests that clearly-identifiable civilians are more likely to be spared when combatants are able to personally control and direct their fire."

Children accounted for 42.3% of air strike victims; 6.5% of small arms victims.

Trends

One fact that the dossier does show clearly, in favour of the US led coalition forces, is that the amount of civilians directly killed by coalition troops has declined sharply. "Undoubtedly," agrees Sloboda. "Since the begining of 2005, there have been tiny numbers killed directly by US forces, and these tend to be by checkpoints etc [Editor's note: as was the case with Italian secret service agent Nicola Calipari]. The vast majority of deaths caused now, are being caused by crime, anti-coalition forces, and unknown forces."

The breakdown of killings outside of direct US led forces involvement also gives pause for thought. While the lines are often blurred, as pointed out by the LA Times ("In some cases, authorities say, the motives are so opaque that they cannot tell whether they are investigating a crime disguised as an act of war or a political assassination masquerading as a violent business dispute.”), according to the IBC insurgent anti-US forces have accounted for between 9 and 15% of all civilian killings, while crime related killings have been responsible for up to 36% of civilian deaths.

Sloboda is a Professor of Psychology, with a particular interest in the psychology of music. He is also an unashamed activist: "I've been a lifelong member of what you might call the 'peace movement'. I've always felt that military responses to situations are admissions of failure on the part of humanity, that there's always a better way". This background, combined with strongly worded editorials on the IBC site that criticise the decision to go to war has led critics to claim that their figures are biased.

This brings us full circle. If there are problems with the figures collated by the Iraqi Body Count, then who do we have to blame? The US and UK governments have a moral, if not legal, responsibility to collect and present this information to their electorates. Or should we presume that Iraqi civilians don't count?