Casualties of The Iraq War - Iraqi Invasion Casualties

Iraqi Invasion Casualties

In March 2002 — before the Iraq War — at a news conference at Bagram Air Base, Afghanistan, U.S. General Tommy Franks had said, "we don't do body counts."

Franks reportedly estimated soon after the invasion that there had been 30,000 Iraqi casualties as of April 9, 2003. That number comes from the transcript of an October 2003 interview of U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld with journalist Bob Woodward. They were discussing a number reported by The Washington Post. But neither could remember the number clearly, nor whether it was just for deaths, or both deaths and wounded.

A May 28, 2003, Guardian article reported "Extrapolating from the death-rates of between 3% and 10% found in the units around Baghdad, one reaches a toll of between 13,500 and 45,000 dead among troops and paramilitaries.

An October 20, 2003, study by the Project on Defense Alternatives at Commonwealth Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, stated that for March 19, 2003, to April 30, 2003, "Based on the analysis that follows we estimate that the 2003 Iraq war produced between 7,600 and 10,800 Iraqi combatant fatalities."

The study also stated: "Our analysis of the evidence leads to the conclusion that between 10,800 and 15,100 Iraqis were killed in the war. Of these, between 3,200 and 4,300 were noncombatants – that is: civilians who did not take up arms."

The study explained that to arrive at these numbers, they had adjusted the underlying incident reports from the field by reducing each count by anywhere from 20% to 60%, based on their own reliability assessments, in order to "control for casualty inflation – a prevalent form of bias."

The study author Carl Conetta reported: "All told, more than 40,000 Iraqis were killed or injured,"

The Iraq Body Count project (IBC) documented a higher number of civilian deaths up to the end of the major combat phase (May 1, 2003). In a 2005 report, using updated information, the IBC reported that 7,299 civilians are documented to have been killed, primarily by U.S. air and ground forces. There were 17,338 civilian injuries inflicted up to May 1, 2003. The IBC says its figures are probably underestimates because: "many deaths will probably go unreported or unrecorded by officials and media."