Exact Iraqi death toll remains elusive

updated 6:56 p.m. ET March 10, 2006

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Three years into the war, one grim measure of its impact on Iraqis can be seen at Baghdad’s morgue: There, the staff has photographed and catalogued more than 24,000 bodies from the Baghdad area alone since 2003, almost all killed in violence.

Despite such snapshots, the overall number of Iraqi civilians and soldiers killed since the U.S.-led invasion in spring 2003 remains murky. Bloodshed has worsened each year, pushing the Iraqi death toll into the tens of thousands. But no one knows the exact toll.

President Bush has said he thinks violence claimed at least 30,000 Iraqi dead as of December, while some researchers have cited numbers of 50,000, 75,000 or beyond.

The Pentagon has carefully counted the number of American military dead — now more than 2,300 — but declines to release its tally of Iraqi civilian or insurgent deaths.

The health ministry estimates 1,093 civilians died in the first two months of this year, nearly a quarter of the deaths government ministries reported in all of 2005.

The Iraqi government, however, has swung wildly in its casualty estimates, leading many to view its figures with skepticism.

Rising annual death tolls
At the Baghdad morgue, more than 10,000 corpses were delivered in 2005, up from more than 8,000 in 2004 and about 6,000 in 2003, said the morgue’s director Dr. Faik Baker. All were corpses from either suspicious deaths or violent or war-related deaths — things like car bombs and gunshot wounds, tribal reprisals or crime — and not from natural causes.

By contrast, the morgue recorded fewer than 3,000 violent or suspicious deaths in 2002, before the war, Baker said. The tally at the Baghdad morgue alone — one of several mortuaries in Iraq — thus exceeds figures from Iraqi government ministries that say 7,429 Iraqis were killed across all of Iraq in 2005.

“The violence keeps getting worse,” the morgue director said Feb. 28 by phone from Jordan, where he said he had fled recently for his own safety after he said he was under pressure to not report deaths. Freezers built to hold six bodies are sometimes crammed with 20 unclaimed corpses. “You can imagine what a mess it is,” he said.

Baghdad, which has a fifth of Iraq’s 25 million inhabitants, has been a main center of the violence, with insurgent attacks and sectarian tensions both high here.

Many of the Baghdad morgue’s bodies arrive from the emergency room at Yarmouk Hospital, where Dr. Osama Abdul Wahab said his staff occasionally had to deal with groups of two or three trauma patients before the invasion. Now they must cope with dozens of casualties at a time, he said.

“All of a sudden the doors of hell open and 40 injured patients arrive and you are alone,” said Abdul Wahab, a 31-year-old neurologist.

Civilians bear the brunt
Regardless of the lack of a precise figure on deaths, virtually all studies agree that among Iraqi government security forces, the police are at greater risk than the army. But it is Iraqi civilians who bear the brunt of the deaths.

According to the government’s own count, twice as many Iraqi civilians — 4,024 — died last year in insurgency-related violence as police and soldiers.

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