At least 3,240 civilians died across Iraq during a month of war, including 1,896 in Baghdad, according to a five-week AP investigation.
The count is still fragmentary, and the complete toll -- if it is ever tallied -- is sure to be significantly higher.
Several surveys have looked at civilian casualties within Baghdad, but the AP tally is the first attempt to gauge the scale of such deaths from one end of the country to the other, from Mosul in the north to Basra in the south.
The AP count was based on records from 60 of Iraq's 124 hospitals -- including almost all of the large facilities -- and covers the period between March 20, when the war began, and April 20, when fighting was dying down and allied forces announced they would soon declare major combat over.
AP journalists traveled to all of these hospitals, studying their logs, examining death certificates where available and interviewing officials about what they witnessed.
Many of the other 64 hospitals are in small towns and were not visited because they are in dangerous or inaccessible areas. Some hospitals that were visited had incomplete or war-damaged casualty records.
Even if hospital records were complete, they would not tell the full story. Many of the dead were never taken to hospitals, either buried quickly by their families in accordance with Islamic custom, or lost under the rubble.
The AP excluded all counts done by hospitals whose written records did not distinguish between civilian and military dead, which means hundreds, possibly thousands of victims in Iraq's largest cities. Most intense battles aren't reflected in the total.
During the first weeks of the war, the Iraqi government made its own attempt to keep track of civilian deaths, but that effort fell apart as US troops neared Baghdad and the government began to topple.
Lieutenant Colonel Jim Cassella, a Pentagon spokesman, said Tuesday that the US military did not count civilian casualties. "Our efforts focus on destroying the enemy's capabilities, so we never target civilians and have no reason to try to count such unintended deaths," he said.
The British Defence Ministry said it didn't count casualties either.
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