Iraq Body Count

Iraq Body Count (IBC) describes itself as “an ongoing human security project which maintains and updates the world’s only independent and comprehensive public database of media-reported civilian deaths in Iraq that have resulted from the 2003 military intervention by the USA and its allies. The count includes civilian deaths caused by coalition military action and by military or paramilitary responses to the coalition presence (e.g. insurgent and terrorist attacks).”

However, as Medialens notes: “In reality, IBC is not primarily an Iraq Body Count, it is not even an Iraq Media Body Count, it is an Iraq Western Media Body Count.”

One of the world’s leading professional epidemiologists, anonymously noted in an email to medialens that:

IBC is run by amateurs. It is easy to calculate the sensitivity of their surveillance system. They would take another list or independent sample, and see the fraction of that sample that appeared in their data base. I have asked them to do this over a year ago, they have not.
There are other databases out there (NCCI being the most complete), they could do a capture-recapture analysis (as lots of experts have been calling for) and see how many people have died but they have not.

On June 15, 2006, Iraq Body Count estimated that between 38,355 to 42,747 civilians have died in Iraq. This came on the same day when it was announced that the number of U.S. troops killed in Iraq has reached 2,500 with the death of a marine.

History

"IBC's methodology was devised by Marc Herold, a professor of economics at the University of New Hampshire. Herold has tracked deaths in Afghanistan since the US-led invasion of 2001. It was Herold's Afghan Victim Memorial Project that inspired John Sloboda to set up IBC."

Founders

• Hamit Dardagan - Co-founder - Principal researcher and site manager. Hamit has also been chair of Kalayaan a human rights campaign for overseas domestic workers in the UK.
• John Sloboda - Co-founder - Associate researcher and archivist. John has worked with the Committee for Peace in the Balkans, and researched effects on the civilian population of the NATO bombing campaign. Since September 11th 2001 he has been responsible for the daily peaceuk.net mailing list disseminating critical non-violent perspectives on “the war on terror”. He is a founder member of the Network of Activist Scholars of Politics and International Relations (NASPIR), and a local delegate to the Stop the War Coalition. He is currently Web Resources Manager for Peace News, and in January 2004 was appointed Executive Director of Oxford Research Group.

Contact details

Email: comment@iraqbodycount.org Web: http://www.iraqbodycount.org

External links

• Les Roberts, Riyadh Lafta, Richard Garfield, Jamal Khudhairi, Gilbert Burnham, "Mortality before and after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: cluster sample survey", Centre for Research on Globalisation, 29 October, 2004.
• Stephen Soldz, "When Promoting Truth Obscures the Truth: More on Iraqi Body Count and Iraqi Deaths", ZNet, February 5, 2006.
• Les Roberts, "Do Iraqi Civilian Casualties Matter?", AlterNet, February 14, 2006.
• John Sloboda, Hamit Dardagan, "On the Iraq Body Count project", Presentation based on a lecture given by John Sloboda in February 2006.

Media Lens critique

• Medialens, Paved with good intentions - Iraq Body Count - Part 1, Medialens Alert, January 25, 2006.
• Medialens, Paved with good intentions - Iraq Body Count - Part 2", Medialens Alert, January 26, 2006.
• Medialens, Media alert update: Iraq Body Count refuses to respond, Medialens Alert, March 14, 2006.
• Medialens, Iraq Body Count - a shame becoming shameful, Medialens Alert, April 10, 2006.
• Medialens, Democracy and debate - killing Iraq, Medialens Alert, October 18, 2006.
• Medialens, Wikileaks - The Smear and the Denial, MediaLens, 8 November 2010.