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In Iraq, a September 11th every 5 days
[mis à jour le 12 October 2006 à 18h16]
Almost 655,000 Iraqis have been killed since the invasion in March 2003. That’s 2.5% of the population. This is the estimate put forward in an article published today by The Lancet. Each week more than 4,000 people die in Iraq.
Professor Gilbert Burnham and his colleagues at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore monitored 1,849 households between May and June 2006. Scattered across the whole of Iraq, these families agreed to provide them with information about how many members of their family had died, the causes of their deaths and, most importantly … to let them see the death certificates. Which eliminates any suggestion of subjectivity. “ Civilians and military alike the authors point out. They went on to calculate the mortality rate and then to compare it with the situation that existed before the war.
The result? The mortality rate “went from 5.5 per 1,000 in 2003, to 13.3 per 1,000 in 2006. So it has more than doubled in 3 years. “It is therefore estimated that 655,000 Iraqis have died following the military invasion of March 2003, says Burnham. That is to say, just over 200,000 per year, and 4,000 per week. Of these victims, almost 6 out of 10 (56%) have been killed by gunshot. Assassination attempts on the other hand only seem to account for 13 to 14% of those killed. And 3 out of 10 (31%) are directly attributable to the Coalition forces.
“This is the most murderous international conflict of the 21st century, the authors conclude. “It is urgent that an independent international body examine whether the Geneva Convention and other humanitarian standards are being respected in this conflict.
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