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US President George W. Bush dismissed as “not credible” an independent US study which estimated that 655,000 Iraqis had died in Iraq since the 2003 US invasion.
But the study author stood by the findings, which estimated that one Iraqi in 40 had died as a result of the conflict. The study compared the death rates from the period before the war to the period from March 2003 to June 2006.
“I do know that a lot of innocent people have died, and it troubles me and grieves me,” Bush said at a White House press conference.
But the president added that he and his top military advisers believe “the methodology is pretty well discredited.”
The US president in the past has estimated the number of Iraqi deaths to be closer to 30,000, and reaffirmed that number Wednesday.
“I stand by the figure,” he said. “Six hundred thousand or whatever they guessed at … it's not credible.”
Echoing Bush's comments, the top US commander in Iraq, General George Casey, also dismissed the study as lacking credibility, saying the highest estimate he had seen was 50,000 civilians dead.
Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said the US military did not collect data on civilian deaths and said the Iraqi ministry of health was “probably the best authority.”
The Iraqi ministry's last estimate put the civilian death toll at 128,000. A spokesman for the Iraqi government called the independent study “exaggerated.”
But the author of the study, Gilbert Burnham of the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, defended his findings as reliable and based on methods commonly used by researchers in the health field.
“We use a cluster survey sampling methodology and this is something that is widely used in international health,” said Burnham, co-director of the center for refugees and disaster response at Johns Hopkins.
The survey method is used to confirm government figures for health indicators and “it's increasingly used to look at mortality rate in conflict,” Burnham said.
“The confidence interval is a range within which we are 95 percent certain we have the correct answer,” he said.
The study is to be published Thursday by the British journal The Lancet.
In October 2004, a paper also published in The Lancet calculated that almost 100,000 deaths had occurred in Iraq between March 2003 and September 2004 as a result of violence and heart attack and aggravated health problems.
Updating this, Burnham led a team that sought to make an estimate of deaths in the post-invasion period from March 2003 to June 2006.
The researchers randomly selected 47 sites across Iraq, comprising 1,849 households and 12,801 people.
Interviewers asked householders about births, deaths and migration and if there had been a death since January 2002 and, if so, asked to see a death certificate to note the cause.
Of the 629 deaths recorded, 547, or 87 percent, were in the post-invasion period.
Extrapolated across the country, 654,965 premature deaths — 2.5 percent of the population — have occurred since March 2003, the study says.
“We recorded what people told us in the survey … people are not making up death. In fact they are more likely to under-report death, especially those who are involved in the conflict.”
