Casualty recording in Iraq
Multiple actors have attempted to account for civilian casualties in Iraq since 2003, using a variety of methods. Statistical modelling approaches have produced widely varying estimates of the number of deaths, resulting in controversy; casualty records based on individually documented deaths have correlated with the lower end of these estimates.
Efforts to document deaths accurately and comprehensively have been hampered by many of the typical obstacles encountered by casualty recorders working in active conflict zones. These include lack of coverage of specific regions due to security limitations or remoteness, gaps in coverage during intense periods of violence, and destruction of official records. Displacement of civilian populations due to the conflict make it difficult to trace witnesses who can verify casualty details. Lack of resources to conduct thorough investigations and identification processes further hamper efforts to record details of individual fatalities. Casualty recorders in Iraq have also faced serious threats to their personal safety from parties to the conflict who do not want their actions scrutinised.
Civil society casualty recording efforts
From the beginning of the invasion in 2003, civil society organisations in the UK and elsewhere began documenting civilian fatalities. Their records were based on open-source information including news media reports, official statements by parties to the conflict or UN entities, and hospital or morgue records.
The ‘Iraq War Logs’ published by Wikileaks in 2010 – leaked US military documents – provided an important additional source of information on casualties which contributed to civil society records. The War Logs included details of 109,000 conflict deaths between 2004 and 2009, of which 66,081 were civilians. This insight was particularly significant because the US and British authorities had previously denied that they held any record of civilian deaths. Although the War Logs themselves did not record full identifying details of victims, they provided important corroboration and additional material for civil society casualty recorders such as Iraq Body Count. An analysis of the implications of the War Logs data for casualty records overall is available here.
The War Logs also revealed that some deaths which had been publicly declared by Coalition forces as combatants were in fact civilians. This is a common controversy with efforts to document conflict casualties. In some cases misattribution of civilian/combatant status is due to genuine confusion in complex, fast-moving, conflicts involving multiple parties. On other occasions, it appears that armed forces knowingly or recklessly report fatalities as combatants rather than civilians, to avoid negative publicity. Documenting all casualties, in as much detail as possible, is vital for ensuring their status can be accurately determined by independent experts.
Civil society casualty records have been used by the European Asylum Support Office to help determine international protection status of civilians from Iraq. They have also been referenced by the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court. These casualty records have also been cited in debates in the UK Parliament concerning the human cost of military interventions in Iraq, and later during debates on proposed military intervention in Syria.
Coalition forces – failings and criticisms
In 2003, at the start of the US-led invasion, there was little public discussion of the likely scale of civilian casualties and there was no attempt to establish mechanisms to monitor casualties resulting from coalition action. As the conflict continued and the death toll grew, the lack of transparency around civilian casualties became a politically sensitive issue in many coalition countries.
An independent inquiry into the Iraq war, known as the Chilcot Inquiry, was opened in the UK in 2009 and published its final report in 2016. Among many other issues, it addressed the UK government’s failure to adequately estimate civilian casualty figures before committing to military action, and its subsequent failure to monitor and report on these once the invasion had taken place and scale of loss of life had clearly and dramatically surpassed all prior expectations. Chapter 17 of the inquiry report exclusively addresses the matter of civilian casualties.
Among its findings, the Chilcot Inquiry report found that ‘Government has a responsibility to make every reasonable effort to understand the likely and actual effects of its military actions on civilians’ and that it should ‘be ready to work with others, in particular NGOs and academic institutions, to develop such assessments and estimates over time’. However, it concluded that the UK Ministry of Defence had made only ‘a broad estimate’ of likely direct civilian casualties prior to the invasion, and that ‘greater efforts should have been made in the post‑conflict period to determine the number of civilian casualties’. The Inquiry criticised the government for spending more time disputing ‘which department should have responsibility for the issue of civilian casualties than … to determine the actual number.’
Statistical modelling controversy
The Lancet is an independent, international medical journal which publishes weekly peer-reviewed articles on clinical, public health, and global health knowledge. It published two major studies on casualties of the Iraq war, in 2004 and 2006. These studies were based on cluster sampling methodology, which involved randomly selecting geographical clusters and conducting household surveys about deaths before and after the invasion.
The 2006 Lancet study estimated that there had been approximately 655,000 excess deaths in Iraq between 2003-2006. In contrast, a study by the World Health Organisation and Iraqi Ministry of Health estimated around 151,000 violent deaths over the same period.
The wide variance between these estimates sparked intense debate in the academic and policy communities. Critics of the Lancet studies questioned their sampling methodology, whilst their supporters argued that others were deliberately undercounting deaths for political reasons.
The controversy highlighted the challenges in using statistical approaches to try to estimate casualties in situations of armed conflict. These obstacles include issues of accessibility in active war zones, the difficulty of establishing baseline mortality rates, varying definitions of what constitutes a ‘conflict-related’ death, and distinguishing civilians from combatants.
This 2024 journal article provides further analysis and discussion of the reliability of different statistical approaches to accounting for deaths in Iraq. It also compares these approaches with the records produced by Iraq Body Count, and finds that the figures from individually documented casualty records are consistent with the more reliable statistical estimates.
UN casualty recording and tracking in Iraq
The United Nations Assistance Mission in Iraq (UNAMI) began publishing monthly civilian casualty reports in 2005, based on direct monitoring and verification by UN entities in Iraq. However, regularly fluctuating security conditions across different regions and over the course of the armed conflict created major obstacles for verifying casualties. In many cases, casualties could only be partially verified at best. UNAMI has publicly cautioned that its casualty figures must be considered an absolute minimum rather than a consistent and comprehensive record.
UNAMI’s casualty reports continued to be published regularly until 2020 when they became less frequent, thanks to the decreasing death rate. UNAMI casualty reports included detailed demographic data on victims and patterns of harm, but did not publicly identify individual victims. For this reason, they should be considered as casualty tracking rather than casualty recording. The primary aim of UNAMI’s casualty reports was to highlight civilian protection needs and provide evidence for advocacy with parties to the conflict to reduce civilian harm and increase compliance with international human rights and humanitarian law.
Iraqi government-led initiatives
Following the 2003 invasion and subsequent years of armed conflict, information on violent deaths was recorded by the Ministry of Health through hospital and morgue data. However, these records were incomplete and inconsistent. Many victims never passed through the medical or deathcare system and were directly buried or not identified.
In 2005, the Iraqi government established the Martyrs’ Foundation to document victims of the Saddam Hussein regime. The Foundation is believed to have documented hundreds of thousands of victims, including victims of extrajudicial executions, chemical weapons attacks, and enforced disappearances. It is mandated to provide material support and compensation to victims’ surviving family members, help identify missing persons and human remains, and document human rights violations of the Ba’ath regime. There has been some controversy over the parameters of which victims the Foundation recognises and documents.
The Iraqi Ministry of Human Rights – established in 2003 by the Coalition Provisional Authority – compiled casualty records covering the Saddam Hussein regime, as well as casualties of the 2003 invasion and subsequent conflict. Information on casualties was gathered through field investigations, interviews with survivors, exhumation of mass graves, and analysis of government records. The Ministry published reports on hundreds of thousands of people killed during the Saddam Hussein regime, including victims of chemical attacks and campaigns targeting the Kurdish population. It also published periodic reports on casualties during the post-2003 violence, including breakdowns by province and cause of death.
When the Ministry of Human Rights was dissolved in 2015, some of its records were transferred to the Martyrs Foundation and others to the Iraqi High Commission for Human Rights. There have been concerns about the loss of records and evidence during this process, and consistency of ongoing casualty documentation efforts.
