Wartime estimates of Iraqi civilian casualties

Challenges exist when making reliable and valid estimates of civilian mortality due to war. This article first discusses a framework used to examine war’s impact on civilians and then considers challenges common to each statistical approach taken to estimate civilian casualties. It examines the different approaches that have been used to estimate civilian casualties associated with the recent fighting in Iraq to date and compares the results of different approaches. The author concludes by proposing that after fighting has ceased, other approaches to estimating Iraqi civilian mortality, such as post-war retrospective surveys and demographic analysis, should be employed. During wartime, the public and policymakers legitimately thirst for figures on the war’s civilian death toll due to the war’s direct violent and indirect health effects on a population. In real time, the public wants to know ‘‘How many have died?’’ However, with few exceptions until relatively recently, demographers and epidemiologists have not applied their expertise to making rigorous, credible estimates of the mortality and morbidity impacts of conflict on populations during wartime. Sometimes a lack of professional freedom prevents those who are perhaps most familiar with data on the suffering population (e.g., analysts whose livelihoods depend on the government(s) directly involved in the conflict) from becoming engaged in the discussion of the conflict’s impact. But barring professional freedom issues, wartime circumstances pose other challenges to making civilian casualty estimates. * The author thanks William Arkin and other participants in the February 2006 Conference on Casualties and Warfare, held by the Triangle Institute for Security Studies at Duke University, for comments on a previous version of this paper, as well as Anthony Smith, Jr, for his comments on an earlier draft. Volume 89 Number 868 December 2007