Austin Bay Blog

This article appears in the October 30 NY Times.

Significant paragraphs:

According to the graph, Iraqi civilians and security forces were killed and wounded by insurgents at a rate of about 26 a day early in 2004, and at a rate of about 40 a day later that year. The rate increased in 2005 to about 51 a day, and by the end of August had jumped to about 63 a day. No figures were provided for the number of Iraqis killed by American-led forces.

Extrapolating the daily averages over the months from Jan. 1, 2004, to Sept. 16 this year results in a total of 25,902 Iraqi civilians and security forces killed and wounded by insurgents.

According to an analysis by Hamit Dardagan, who compiles statistics for Iraq Body Count, a group that tracks civilian deaths, about three Iraqis are wounded in the war for each one who dies. Given that ratio, the total Iraqi death toll from insurgent violence would be about 6,475, based on extrapolations of the military’s figures.

“It strikes me as low,” said Marc Garlasco, senior military analyst at Human Rights Watch in New York. More Iraqis are dying now in insurgent attacks than at American checkpoints or in American military operations, he said, but the numbers of Iraqis killed by Americans would still add to the overall total.

Indeed, the tally is lower than the 11,163 deaths of Iraqi civilians in the war during the same period counted by Mr. Dardagan’s group, which draws its data from reports of deaths and injuries by news services, newspapers and other news outlets.

It is also lower than figures released by Iraq’s Interior Ministry showing that 8,175 Iraqi civilians and police officers had been killed by insurgents from August 2004 through May 2005. Even so, the tallies show that the military has been recording Iraqi deaths by insurgents with some regularity since the first months after the invasion.

The casualties were compiled from reports filed by coalition military units after they responded to attacks, said Lt. Col. Barry Venable, a Pentagon spokesman, in answers to questions from The New York Times sent by e-mail.

The numbers are spotty, he said, because forces do not respond to every attack, and initial on-site counts are often incomplete. The count did not separate the dead from the wounded, nor did it differentiate between civilians and police officers or soldiers.

“These incident reports are not intended to provide - and do not provide - a comprehensive account of Iraqi casualties,” Colonel Venable said in his e-mail message. The information in the reports shows “trends in casualties resulting from insurgent attacks.”

The report, “Measuring Stability and Security in Iraq,” was the second of the quarterly accountings mandated by Congress this year in connection with an emergency spending bill. The first, issued in July, was criticized by some members of Congress for providing too few details about the effort in Iraq.

The second report, which included the Iraqi casualty figures, was twice as long as the first and was posted on the Department of Defense Web site on Oct. 13.

Colonel Venable said information on civilians was included in the October report “as a result of specific questions posed by Congressional staffers during briefings.”

“We were very interested in it,” said Timothy Rieser, an aide to Senator Patrick J. Leahy, the Vermont Democrat who sponsored the amendment to the fiscal year 2006 Defense Authorization Bill that calls for casualty details. “After denying that they keep these statistics, it gives the Congress something concrete to ask them about,” Mr. Rieser said.

The bar graph was made public, but the data underlying it was not, so the figures used for this article were derived from measuring the bars. Colonel Venable said the information had been classified because it could allow insurgents to assess the effectiveness of their attacks. Mr. Dardagan questioned the secrecy, citing regular releases of American deaths.

“We now know that the U.S. military does keep records of Iraqi civilian deaths,” Mr. Dardagan said. “There seems to be no obvious reason for keeping them a secret.”

Previously, the military said its records were so incomplete that it would not release any data. In July, Lt. Col. Steven Boylan, a spokesman for the American military in Baghdad, said, “We do not have the ability to get accurate data. We do not have visibility all over Iraq in every location.”

After months of playing down casualty counts, the inclusion of the numbers in the report seemed to be an acknowledgment of their importance for the military, which has also begun to regularly report tallies of insurgents killed in American operations…

The “extrapolated” 6,475 figure (apparently extrapolated by either the NY Times or Human Rights Watch) strikes me as low as well. A fact the article could have mentioned, but didn’t: The Saddamist secular fascists and jihadi theo-fascists murder the Iraqi people, and hence murder Muslims.