By Terry Kirby and Elizabeth Davies
Almost 25,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed during the two years of war and insurgency that began with the US-led invasion in March 2003. More than a third have died as a result of action by allied forces.
The first detailed and authoritative study of non-combatant casualties claims that an average of 34 Iraqi civilians have died each day since the conflict began, a total of 24,865 deaths.
The authors of the report, published yesterday by a group called Iraq Body Count, said the figures showed the country was descending into "anarchy" under the US occupation and called upon Britain and America to establish urgently a method of officially recording civilian casualties - something they have so far refused to do.
Professor John Sloboda, one of the report's authors, said: "The failure of Western governments to recognise the lack of respect in not counting the civilian casualties must be a contributing factor to Muslim disaffection and anger.''
The report shows the anti- occupation or insurgency forces were solely responsible for the deaths of only 9 per cent, or 2,353 of the civilian total, despite the almost daily suicide bombings, that have accounted for more than 200 deaths this month alone.
American forces were responsible for 98.5 per cent of the 9,270 civilians assessed to have been killed by allied forces, or 37 per cent of the total who have died. Out of the remaining 1.5 per cent of the total killed by allied forces, British soldiers were responsible for the highest total, with 86 people.
The number of deaths suffered by military forces are small - there have been 93 British service personnel killed and 1,769 Americans. No figure has been put on Iraqi military casualties.
Indicating the level to which Iraq has become a far more lawless environment since Saddam Hussein was deposed, 8,935 of the killings, or 35.9 per cent, were of people involved in - or targeted by - conventional criminal activity although the report says the boundaries between criminal killings and those attributed to the insurgency were often blurred.
A Dossier of Civilian Casualties, 2003-2005 was compiled by Iraq Body Count (IBC) and Oxford Research Group, an alliance of academics and peace campaigners. The analysis is based on media reports as well as official figures from the Iraqi ministry of health and mortuaries.
The only previous attempt to assess the level of civilian casualties was published in The Lancet medical journal last October and put the figure at 100,000, based on a survey of Iraqi households. Although it was seized upon by opponents of the war as justifying their worst fears, its methodology was subsequently criticised.
The IBC report says the highest concentration of civilian deaths was during the so-called "invasion phase" of the conflict in March and April 2003, when 30 per cent of the civilian deaths occurred. In the two years since the end of the "combat" phase, the number of civilians killed was almost twice as high in year two (11,351) as in year one (6,215).
Detailed examination of the figures show that women and children accounted for almost 20 per cent of all civilian deaths, with one in every 200 being a child under the age of two. Almost half of all deaths occurred in Baghdad.
Most of the civilian deaths (53 per cent) involved explosive devices, most of which came from air strikes during the early stage of the conflict and which caused a disproportionately high level of casualties among children. The report says it shows that, while such weapons are an advantage to the military, they have a very high potential to kill indiscriminately.
Out of the deaths caused by insurgents, 4.3 per cent of the total were killed by suicide bombers. Police accounted for the largest single occupational category among the dead, with 977 reported deaths.
Speaking at the launch of the report in London, Professor Sloboda added: " The ever-mounting Iraqi death toll is the forgotten cost of the decision to go to war in Iraq. It remains a matter of the gravest concern that, nearly two and a half years on, neither the US nor the UK governments have begun to systematically measure the impact of their actions in terms of human lives destroyed."
Another of the report's authors, Toby Dodge, a Middle East expert and lecturer in politics at Queen Mary, University of London, said: "Iraq is descending into anarchy and the US presence is not helping. It has shown its incapacity to create a peaceful state. Never again will intervening states so greatly underestimate what is involved in invading and rebuilding a country."
