The WHO on Wednesday waded into the controversial subject of Iraqi civilian deaths, publishing a study that estimated that the number of deaths from the start of the war until June 2006 was at least twice as high as the oft-cited Iraq Body Count.
The subject of Iraqi civilian deaths is politically fraught, and researchers and analysts have struggled for several years to come up with realistic numbers. Their work has been further complicated by trying to collect data while working in a war zone.
The estimates have varied widely. The Iraq Body Count, a nongovernmental group based in Britain that bases its numbers on news media accounts, put the number of civilians dead at 47,668 during the same period of time that the WHO study was conducted. But another study by Johns Hopkins, which has come under criticism for its methodology, cited an estimate of about 600,000 dead from the start of the war until July 2006, about the same period of time at the WHO study.
The WHO said its study indicated with a 95 percent degree of certainty that between 104,000 and 223,000 civilians had died. It based its estimate of 151,000 dead on that range.
Those figures made violence the leading cause of adult male deaths in Iraq and one of the leading causes of death for the population as a whole, the health organization research team reported online in the New England Journal of Medicine. More than half the violent deaths occurred in Baghdad.
While the new study appears to have the broadest scope to date, increasing its reliability, well-known limitations of such efforts in war areas make it unlikely to resolve debate about the extent of the killing in Iraq.
Iraqi officials gave conflicting assessments of the newest study, with one senior Health Ministry official praising it and another claiming the numbers were exaggerated.
The White House said that it had not seen the study and would not comment on its estimated death toll, but that the recent increase in US forces had reduced civilian and military casualties.
"We mourn the deaths of all people in Iraq," said Jeanie Mamo, a White House spokeswoman. "The unmistakable fact is that the vast majority of these deaths are caused by the murderous intentions of extremists."
In any case, the study -- which was from March 2003 to June 2006 -- ended four months after the bombing of a revered Shiite shrine in Samarra helped set off a wave of killings through Baghdad and other mixed Sunni-Shiite areas. So because of its design, the study missed the period of what is believed to be the worst sectarian killings, during the latter half of 2006 and the first eight months of last year.
The figures on violent deaths were part of a large study of chronic illnesses, mental health status, environmental risk factors and other factors affecting family health in Iraq. The figures were based on interviews with heads of households across the country that had been selected according to statistical methods that are standard in peaceful areas. The interviewers, who were employees of the Iraqi Ministry of Health, had been trained in how to ask the survey questions and to assign the stated causes of deaths.
The surveyors largely conducted their work in August and September 2006. At the time in Baghdad, Shiite militiamen, often acting in coordination with or with the acquiescence of fellow Shiites in the Iraq security forces, cleansed many neighborhoods of Sunnis. Many were grabbed, handcuffed, shot in the head and dumped with other victims. Sunni insurgents continued their campaign of terrorizing Shiite areas with car bombs and other attacks.
In fact, one co-author, Louay Hakki Rasheed, was killed on his way to work on Aug. 2. The extraordinarily dangerous security situation prevented them from visiting about 11 percent of the areas that the researchers had intended to visit.
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