By David Blair, Baghdad 6:01PM GMT 15 Mar 2013
A study in “The Lancet”, a specialist medical journal, lays bare the price of the Anglo-American invasion that began 10 years ago.
From the moment that the first air strikes took place on March 19 2003, Iraqi civilians began to die.
By the time th
e last US soldiers left in December 2011, “at least 116,903 Iraqi non-combatants” had been killed, according to Barry Levy and Victor Sidel, two American professors of public health from Tufts University and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine respectively.
In addition, 4,487 American and 179 British troops were also killed.
This calculation of civilian fatalities is significantly lower than other estimates. In 2006, “The Lancet” published a study comparing Iraq’s population growth rates before and after the invasion. This concluded that 655,000 “excess deaths” had taken place since the war began in 2003. However, the methodology of that survey was widely criticised.
Iraq Body Count, a website that totals the reported number of dead in each incident, has reached a similar conclusion to the latest study. It currently places the number of civilian deaths at between 111,687 and 122,108.
As for the financial cost, the new study makes conservative assumptions, omitting the interest payments on the higher US national debt caused by the Iraq war.
If those are included, the