[classicman]

Bump - Couldn't find the thread where we were discussing the casualty counts and all so I put this here.

The study covered the period from the March 20, 2003 invasion through March 19, 2008, in which 91,358 violent deaths were recorded by Iraq Body Count.

The total number of civilian deaths in Iraq is widely disputed, but the count by the London-based group is widely considered a credible minimum.

Iraq Body Count uses figures from morgues and hospitals since the war started.

However, the authors focused on only 60,481 deaths linked to specific events, excluding Iraqis killed in prolonged episodes of violence during the U.S.-led invasion and the U.S. sieges of the former insurgent stronghold of Fallujah in 2004.

The study found that 19,706 of the victims, or 33 percent, were abducted and killed execution-style, with nearly a third of those showing signs of torture such as bruises, drill holes or burns.

That compared with 16,922, or 27 percent, who died in bombings, most of them in suicide attacks.

The figures were similar to those recorded by the AP.

While the study didn't assign blame for the killings, death squads largely run by Shiite militias were believed to be behind many of the bullet-riddled bodies that turned up by the dozens on the streets of Baghdad and other cities — often stripped of any identification.

Those death squads were seeking revenge for the deaths of Shiite civilians at the hands of al-Qaida and other Sunni religious extremists in suicide bombings and other attacks.

Nor did they attempt to speculate how many missing people could be dead.

Although such killings continue, the numbers of bodies found every day have dropped to the single digits since the U.S. troop surge and a cease-fire called by the main militia leader, Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, in August 2007.

The drop in violence is also due in part to the fact that many formerly mixed neighborhoods in Baghdad have been effectively segregated after the minority sect was purged by the death squads. Baghdad has since become a maze of concrete walls and checkpoints aimed at ensuring security.

Marc Garlasco, a senior military analyst with the New York-based Human Rights Watch, blamed the sectarian violence and insurgency that followed the ouster of Saddam Hussein on poor postwar planning by the United States.

Only 4 percent of the Iraqi deaths included in the study, or 2,363, were a result of U.S. airstrikes, which frequently targeted suspected insurgents hiding in houses. But 46 percent of the victims whose gender could be determined were female and 39 percent were children.

The authors caution that those percentages may be inflated "because the media may tend to specifically identify female and young victims more readily than male adults among the dead."