IRAQ BODY COUNT Press Releases

PR7 - Thursday March 19th 2004

700 named in Iraq's death toll after a year of slaughter

As the anniversary of the Iraq invasion approaches, Iraq Body Count has been able to establish the names of almost 700 civilians killed in Iraq between March 19th 2003 and February 29th 2004 as a direct consequence of the US/UK invasion and subsequent occupation.

The list, periodically updated and permanently available on the Iraq Body Count website http://www.iraqbodycount.net/names.htm , details (where known) name, age, gender, place of death, cause of death, and the media sources from which they were obtained.

Although this list provides details for less than 7% of the 10,000 civilians reported killed during the same period (see http://www.iraqbodycount.net/bodycount.htm ), it is the closest so far to a truly comprehensive accounting and memorial for the civilian dead in Iraq. Among the 692 deaths listed there are 106 females, 421 males and 94 known to be under 18 years of age.

As world opinion increasingly turns against the US-led coalition for the lies that forced war on a powerless country, and for the chaos into which Iraq has now sunk, the human details pieced together in the Iraq Body Count list paint in graphic and poignant form the terrible, true cost of this war: the pointless loss of husbands, wives, sons and daughters of a proud but suffering people.

John Sloboda, co-founder of Iraq Body Count said "We hope that many organisations, agencies, and web-sites will wish to refer to this list and carry a link to it. Now, in this anniversary week, it has never been more important for us to offer the respect to those victims of war and civil disorder that has been denied them by the US and UK governments, as well as by the officials in Baghdad that they control."

For further information please email press@iraqbodycount.org

PR6 - Sunday February 8th 2004 - 9.00 a.m.

As many as 10,000 civilians were killed in Iraq during 2003.
Forget Hutton and other sideshows: this is the central issue demanding an official inquiry.

As many as 10,000 non-combatant civilian deaths during 2003 have been reliably reported so far as a result of the US/UK-led invasion and occupation of Iraq, according to Iraq Body Count (IBC), an independent group of US and UK researchers. These reports provide figures which range between a minimum of 8,235 and a maximum of 10,079 as of Saturday 7th February 2004. IBC's experience of data-gathering throughout the preceding year shows that reports of additional deaths often continue to emerge many months after the event. Many civilian deaths are almost certainly, as yet, unreported, and even the current IBC maximum cannot be considered to approach a complete and final toll of innocent deaths.

Calls for an official reckoning are mounting. In today's "Independent on Sunday" Labour MP Bob Marshall Andrews added his support to IBC's call for an official inquiry into the human costs of the Iraq War.

Based on corroborated media reports, IBC has compiled a data-base of some 300 separate records of civilian deaths. The latest entry (x298) focuses on the hundreds of Iraqi policemen murdered in violent attacks since April 2003. Seen by the occupying authorities and anti-occupation paramilitaries alike as the occupation's front-line defence, Iraqi police have become easy targets compared to heavily-protected US officials and soldiers, and their deaths are just the latest example of how it is the Iraqi people who are paying the heaviest price for the the occupation, just as they paid the major human cost of the war.

In an extensive editorial, the co-founders of IBC show how the official response on both sides of the Atlantic has been characterised by evasive tactics such as:

• repeated professions of ignorance and a denial of any possibility of gaining useful knowledge;

• denial of responsibility, placing this instead on convenient "others" at various points in time – e.g. Saddam during the war, Al Qaida for recent bombings;

• the establishment of narrowly-limited military "self-investigations," the majority of which are never completed or publicly reported;

• official focus limited to US and UK military deaths with wilful ignorance of the price paid by Iraqis;

• deliberate obstruction of Iraqis' own efforts to count their war dead;

• insultingly low token "compensation" payments to a small and arbitrarily-limited number of Iraqi claimants.

At the heart of all these tactics is an implicit double standard, a standard which values the life of a Westerner far above the life of an Arab or an Asian, and which considers lives devastated by our own actions to be unworthy of serious interest and investigation, let alone genuine concern.

Iraq Body Count spokesperson John Sloboda said: "This official disinterest must end. We are now calling for an independent international tribunal to be set up to establish the numbers of dead, the circumstances in which they were killed and an appropriate and just level of compensation for the victims' families."

For further information contact:

John Sloboda (john@iraqbodycount.org)
Hamit Dardagan (hamit@iraqbodycount.org)

PR5 - September 23rd 2003

Over 1,500 violent civilian deaths in occupied Baghdad


The first definitive total of violent civilian deaths in Baghdad since mid April has been published by Iraq Body Count (IBC), an Anglo-American research group tracking media-reported civilian deaths occuring as a consequence of the US/UK military intervention in Iraq.

From April 14th to 31st August, 2,846 violent deaths were recorded by the Baghdad city morgue. When corrected for pre-war death rates in the city a total of at least 1,519 excess violent deaths in Baghdad emerges from reports based on the morgue's records.

IBC's latest study is the first comprehensive count to adjust for the comparable "background level" of deaths in Baghdad in recent pre-war times. It is therefore an estimate of additional deaths in the city directly attributable to the breakdown of law and order following the US takeover and occupation of Baghdad.

The study confirms the widespread anecdotal evidence that violence on the streets of Baghdad has skyrocketed, with the average daily death rate almost tripling since mid April from around 10 per day to over 28 per day during August.

Another worrying development is that during the pre-war period deaths from gunshot wounds accounted for approximately 10% of bodies brought to the morgue, but now account for over 60% of those killed. The small number of reports available for other cities indicate that these trends are being mirrored elsewhere in the country.

Although the majority of deaths are the result of Iraqi on Iraqi violence, some were directly caused by US military fire. There is evidence that these deaths, often from indiscriminate use of firepower, increasingly fail to be reported or remain unacknowledged by occupation forces.
But responsibility for the current mayhem in Baghdad and elsewhere in Iraq is not diffused at the bottom - at the level of ordinary soldiers ill-suited for police-work in a hostile environment - but is concentrated at the top, in the air-conditioned corridors of power in Washington and London.

The Geneva Conventions and Hague Regulations, to which the US and UK are signatories, place the responsibility for ensuring public order and protecting the civilian population from violence on the occupying powers. UN Resolution 1483, which recognized the US/UK as the de facto occupying authority in Iraq, clearly bound them to these duties. But the US/UK are manifestly failing to fulfil them, compounding the death and destruction already unleashed by their invasion of Iraq. At the same time the US, in particular, resists any multilateral initiatives which would lead to an early end to its dominance over the country.

Meanwhile the latest reports from the nation's capital show that, as throughout the summer, the city's daily death toll continues to rise.

IBC researcher Hamit Dardagan said "The US may be effective at waging war but the descent of Iraq's capital city into lawlessness under US occupation shows that it is incompetent at maintaining public order and providing security for the civilian population. The US has toppled Saddam and discovered that it won't be discovering any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. So why is it still there? And if the US military can't ensure the safety of Iraqi civilians and itself poses a danger to them, what is its role in that country?

"It is high time for the occupying authority to take serious steps towards an orderly hand-over of power and jurisdiction to Iraqis instead of making them junior partners in running their own country, and for the US/UK to stop requiring the international community to act as nothing more than a fig-leaf for US control of Iraq.

"Until they do, ordinary Iraqis may justifiably feel ungrateful for a 'liberation' that has removed the fear of Saddam but left them under military occupation and living in terror of their own streets."

[The numbers entered in the IBC Database for x132 are lower than the total of 1,519, but this is because some of the deaths included in this total were already published in the database. For more details see the accompanying Note for x132.]

PR4 - May 6th 2003

HOW MANY CIVILIANS WERE KILLED BY CLUSTER BOMBS?
The Pentagon says 1: Iraq Body Count says at least 200.

An independent research organisation has published detailed evidence of at least 200 civilians killed by coalition cluster bombs since the start of the Iraq War (full details at www.iraqbodycount.net/editorial.htm).

The Pentagon has admitted only one recorded case of a civilian death from cluster munitions in Iraq this year. This extraordinarily low number has been greeted with widespread incredulity. Human Rights Watch director Kenneth Roth has condemned it as a "whitewash". Amnesty International has called for an independent investigation to be held into coalition use of cluster munitions. So far, however, such critics have not been able to draw on a firm counter-estimate of the numbers so far recorded killed.

To begin to fill this informational vacuum an international research team yesterday published the world's first comprehensive numerical analysis of cluster-related deaths.

Since the start of hostilities Iraq Body Count has been building up a meticulous and exhaustive compilation of every reported civilian death in Iraq caused by coalition military action. It has based its work on corroborated reports in key media sources published worldwide. The research team has updated its estimates on a daily basis by adding to a constantly growing on-line data-base (www.iraqbodycount.net/bodycount.htm) which now reports over 100 separate incidents involving up to 2700 civilian deaths in total.

Among these incidents are included reliable reports of at least 200 civilian deaths due to cluster bombs, with up to a further 172 deaths which were probably caused by cluster bombs. Of these 372 deaths, 147 have been caused by detonation of unexploded or "dud" munitions, with around half this number being children.

Many of the press reports from which the data have been extracted contain graphic eyewitness details of injuries and mutilations confirmed by doctors as being typical of cluster bombs, including dismemberment and decapitation, and the riddling of the body with deep shrapnel wounds.

Authors John Sloboda and Hamit Dardagan said "Public concern about the possible misuse of these savagely indiscriminate weapons is rapidly mounting. Our research reveals the shocking disparity between what the world's press has already reported and what the Pentagon is prepared to admit. Those who are genuinely concerned about civilian casualties, and interested in minimising them, can no longer plead ignorance.

PR3 - April 14th 2003

SPECIAL NOTE FOR WEBMASTERS:

With the war - but by no means the body count - entering its chaotic endphase, Iraq Body Count are introducing a new generation of IBC web counters that include live-updating, scrolling text. As corporate media interest wanes and the issue of civilian deaths is pushed further off the mainstream agenda, your website will be able to continue headlining the human cost of "liberation": the new counters will display details from incidents as and when they are added to our count, which will continue for as long as more civilian killings happen or are discovered.

Other improvements to the new web counters include:

- In response to user feedback, the line "Civilian casualties update" has been changed to "Reported civilian deaths" for greater clarity

- single zip file to download entire counter for installation;

- single line of code to enter into your web page;

- configurable parameters for headline scrolling speed, delay, and more;

- new standard web banner size (468x60 pixels) added to the range;

All available from our download partner site, http://www.djf.net/IBC/

PRESS RELEASE MONDAY 14th APRIL 2003

KEEPING CIVILIAN DEATHS IN THE EYE OF THE WORLD

New scrolling web-counters from the Iraq Body Count Project go on-line as the Iraqi conflict moves into its post-war phase.

The unique web-counters, already installed on hundreds of participating web sites worldwide, will continue to headline details of civilians killed in Iraq as they emerge. Automatically-updated, these new web counters will draw on an on-line data base of all reported civilian deaths that has been carefully compiled by a team of researchers working in two continents.

The data base, and supporting commentary, can be found at www.iraqbodycount.org

Co-founder of the site, John Sloboda, said at a Press Conference in the Houses of Parliament, London, Thursday: "As the world's attention passes on from the war it is even more vital that details of civilian deaths are collected and reported. There are ominous rumours of massive civilian casualties in Baghdad and Basra, with hospitals totally unable to cope, and people dying hour by hour. Even if there is no more fighting after today the death toll could still rise massively above the numbers that have so far been reported. Deaths from typhoid and other illnesses caused by coalition bombing of water purification plants are set to rise dramatically."

"No government or official agency has yet committed itself to providing an account of the cost of this conflict in civilian lives. A Swiss Government initiative launched in the middle of the war was abandoned under political pressure. Iraq Body Count will not bow to political pressure from any quarter, but will continue to document this starkest statistic of the cost of war for as long as it is needed."

The research work for this project is carried out entirely by volunteers scanning and collating reports from the world's media. A cautious methodology ensures consistent standards of reporting. To be published in the database, a report must be carried by at least two reputable media sources, and provide an unambiguous report of the number of civilians killed.

As of Sunday, 13 April 2003, we have documented at least 1367 and as many as 1620 reported civilian deaths in Iraq.

PR2 - 03 March 2003

HIGHLIGHT BREAKING NEWS OF CIVILIAN DEATHS ON YOUR WEBSITE

- As war gets under way, Iraq Body Count brings automatically
updated web-counters to your site so that you can headline the
daily toll of civilian killed in the Iraq conflict.

- We have just been nominated by the Independent newspaper (UK) as
top web site of the week.

- Download a web counter for your site from www.iraqbodycount.org
now and participate in this vital project!

Innocent non-combatant deaths are not an acceptable "price" of war,
especially when the aggressors are not paying that price. If the leaders
of the war party go ahead with an invasion of Iraq despite massive,
unprecedented world-wide opposition and condemnation, then we can let
them know that their acts are being recorded for all to see.

Iraq Body Count web counters on participating websites will keep the
daily death-toll before the eyes of the world.

Our rolling update shows the starkest statistic of war: a minimum and
maximum estimate of total civilian deaths from military action by the
USA and its allies, as gathered from a variety of online news sources,
starting January 1st 2003.

With US/UK bombing sorties ratcheting up towards an imminent invasion,
the project has already recorded eleven deaths this year resulting
directly from US-UK air strikes. Six were this Sunday 2nd March, and our
statistics were checked, confirmed and updated within a few hours of
first news.

The www.iraqbodycount.org website contains further information,
including key details of each incident recorded in our
constantly-updated public database along with a full discussion of
methodology used.

This is the first time such a compilation has been done on a virtually
real-time basis, made possible through a geographically distributed
project team in constant electronic communication.

The project builds upon the earlier work of Professor Marc Herold who
produced the most comprehensive tabulation of civilian deaths in the war
on Afghanistan from October 2001 to the present, and the data extraction
methodology has been designed in close consultation with him. Casualty
figures are derived from a comprehensive survey of accredited online
media sources and, where these report differing figures, the range (a
minimum and a maximum) are given.

Help ensure that the personal tragedy of every civilian killed is
acknowledged and remembered.

- Download a counter from www.iraqbodycount.org now and make your
website part of this unique and important project!

Webmasters are invited to visit www.iraqbodycount.org to obtain web
counters, and anyone wishing to support the work of the project is asked
to contact info@iraqbodycount.org

Press and media contacts:
HAMIT DARDAGAN
JOHN SLOBODA
press@iraqbodycount.org

(Older Press Releases...)

IRAQ BODY COUNT Media Coverage:

Iraq Body Count media coverage has been extensive, from the BBC World Service to the NYT, Der Spiegel (Germany) to Libération (France). Among articles that focused specifically on our work, this Wired report, carried in several different language versions, was one of the best:

Iraqi Dead Counted, Not Forgotten By Leander Kahney

Story location: http://www.wired.com/news/conflict/0,2100,58241,00.html

02:00 AM Mar. 28, 2003 PT

A website keeping a running tally of civilian deaths in the Iraq war is attracting a lot of traffic, and appears to be emerging as an authoritative source of information on the gruesome subject.

The Iraq Body Count website claims to attract 100,000 visitors a day, and is increasingly being cited as a source in news outlets such as The Boston Globe, the San Jose Mercury News and the Associated Press.

"We're the responsible recorders of what the bombs are doing," said John Sloboda, one of the site's co-founders. "We're making sure (civilian deaths) are not forgotten, each single one."

The site's producers have also developed a JavaScript Web counter that can be added to any Web page to show the latest fatality estimates. The counters have been adopted by about 200 other websites, the project's site claims.

While no issue is as contentious in the Iraq war as civilian fatalities, no organization -- with the exception of Iraq Body Count -- appears to be keeping score. No one in the media, the U.S. military, the Iraqi government or humanitarian organizations like the Red Cross is estimating the conflict's running cost in Iraqi civilian lives.

Launched in January, the site is run by 16 researchers, largely academics and musicians based in the United States and the United Kingdom.

Sloboda, a 52-year-old psychology professor at the University of Keele in England, and Hamit Dardagan, a freelance researcher who lives in London, started the site.

The pair were inspired by the work of Marc Herold, a professor at the University of New Hampshire who devised the counting methodology when the U.S. military invaded Afghanistan last year. Herold felt Afghan civilian deaths were a critical issue that was largely being ignored. Herold is acting as a consultant to the Iraq Body Count project.

While Sloboda freely admits the project is "intensely political," and that most of the researchers are anti-war activists, he argued that the numbers are apolitical and speak for themselves. The raw data can and has been cited by people in both pro- and anti-war camps.

On one hand, the numbers illustrate the dreadful cost of war. On the other, they show how well smart weapons and careful planning can minimize casualties, especially when compared with the carpet-bombing campaigns of World War II or Vietnam.

"There's no inherent political message in the data," Sloboda said. "You read what you want into it, depending on your political perspective."

The site tallies civilian fatalities by analyzing news reports from dozens of mainstream news outlets, such as the BBC, The New York Times and Fox News.

If at least two reports of any incident -- a bombing, a missile strike or firefight -- record civilian deaths, they are added to the site's database.

There are often conflicting casualty estimates between reports, so the site records both the highest and the lowest numbers reported. As a result, the site's tally is expressed as the minimum and maximum number of fatalities to date. As of Thursday afternoon, the reckoning was at least 227 dead Iraqi civilians, and at most 307.

Sloboda said the site makes no claim to record the absolute numbers of civilians killed. "We are not counting deaths," he said, "but reports of deaths."

If available, the site also records personal details: who was killed, when, where and how.

Sloboda said most of the site's traffic comes from the United States. A link to the site in every story about the conflict posted on Yahoo News is driving a lot of U.S. visitors, he said.

The site has been the target of some heated criticism, most of it concerning the brutality of the Iraqi regime and its responsibility for the deaths of many of its own citizens. In response, Sloboda said, "We're responsible for our governments. We voted them into power. It's our taxes that are paying for the bombs. This is the project we've elected to do."

Sreenath Sreenivasan, director of online journalism at Columbia University, said the site is a novel use of the Internet -- both for gathering data and disseminating it.

Sreenivasan said it is in the interest of both sides of the conflict to control information about casualties -- the United States to play it down, and the Iraqis to play it up -- and if the project's numbers are accurate, then it is providing a unique and useful service.

"This is something we haven't seen in previous wars," he said. "It's another use of information that the Internet is bringing to the public."

The U.S. Department of Defense didn't return calls requesting comment, but in January 2002, during the war in Afghanistan, Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. Dave Lapan told Wired News that U.S. forces only had the resources to track casualties among its own ranks.

"We only track U.S. casualties," he said. "We don't track, and don't have the means to track, casualties ... either civilian or noncivilian."

Lapan said U.S. forces "have gone to painstaking lengths to minimize civilian casualties.... Obviously, we regret any civilian loss of life, and in any case it's always unintended. We avoid attacking targets if there are civilians nearby."

Independent Newspaper (UK)

http://news.independent.co.uk/digital/reviews/story.jsp?story=382284

10 best sites of the week

By Ash Pro
01 March 2003
www.iraqbodycount.net

'According to its "about" section, this site aims "to establish an independent and comprehensive public database of civilian deaths in Iraq resulting directly from military actions by the USA and its allies in 2003". Following on from a similar project centring on Afghanistan (now totalling 3-3,400 civilian deaths), this somewhat macabre, but some would say necessary, tally was already, at the time of writing, five more than many would find acceptable.'

The Washington Post

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A14941-2003Mar12.html

Overseas, Internet Is Rallying Point for Antiwar Activists

By Cynthia L. Webb
washingtonpost.com Staff Writer
Wednesday, March 12, 2003; 10:20 AM

'Iraq Body Count (www.iraqbodycount.net) is pursuing a unique antiwar strategy. Operated by a multinational group of researchers, the site says it will "establish an independent and comprehensive public database of civilian deaths in Iraq resulting directly from military actions by the USA and its allies in 2003."'

OLDER PRESS RELEASES:

PR1 - February 2003

IRAQ BODY COUNT NOW ON-LINE

Automatically updated web-counters freely downloadable onto any web site are at the heart of Iraq Body Count, a project to headline the daily toll of civilian casualties in the Iraq conflict.

The rolling update shows the starkest statistic of war: a minimum and maximum estimate of total civilian deaths from military action by the USA and its allies, as gathered from a variety of online news sources, starting January 1st 2003. With US/UK bombing sorties "preparing the ground" for invasion, the project has already recorded five deaths this year resulting directly from US-UK air strikes.

Clicking on the counter will take browsers to the www.iraqbodycount.org website for further information, including key details of each incident recorded in a constantly-updated public database.

This is the first time such a compilation has been done on a virtually real-time basis, which has been made possible through remote collaboration of the principal workers in the project team, and it is hoped that Iraq Body Count will serve as a model for others.

The project builds upon the earlier work of Professor Marc Herold who produced the most comprehensive tabulation (http://pubpages.unh.edu/~mwherold) of civilian deaths in the war on Afghanistan from October 2001 to the present, and the data extraction methodology has been designed in close consultation with him. Casualty figures are derived from a comprehensive survey of accredited online media sources, and where these report differing figures, the range (a minimum and a maximum) are given. In a further development of the methodology, all results are independently reviewed and error-checked by at least three members of the Iraq Body Count project team before publication.

Project leader Hamit Dardagan said "Civilian casualties are the most unacceptable consequence of all wars. Each civilian death is a tragedy and should never be regarded as the 'cost' of achieving our countries' war aims, because it is not we who are paying the price. One in four killed in the Afghan war were civilians, and in Yugoslavia the proportion was even higher. We believe it is a moral and humanitarian duty that each such death be recorded, publicised, given the weight it deserves and, where possible, investigated to establish whether there are grounds for criminal proceedings."

Webmasters are invited to visit www.iraqbodycount.org to obtain web counters, and anyone wishing to support the work of the project is asked to contact info@iraqbodycount.org

Press and media contacts:
HAMIT DARDAGAN
JOHN SLOBODA
press@iraqbodycount.org