How Many Iraqis Have Died?

By Jeffrey Kluger

When it comes to American deaths in Gulf War II, U.S. officials are quite precise. In the first three weeks of fighting, 110 U.S. troops were killed. The Iraqi body count, by contrast, is a mystery. When American forces first pushed into Baghdad, for example, they boasted of killing as many as 3,000 enemy fighters. The release of that number may have been an effort to rattle the Iraqis. But the estimate was little more than what the military calls a WAG, a wild-assed guess. The Iraqi side can't do much better. No longer does an authority exist to track casualties. Even if one did, the task would be Herculean. In the Muslim world, the deceased are buried as quickly as possible, and war deaths can thus go unrecorded. This is a war that may never have a reliable body count.

It hasn't always been that way. Up through the 19th century, armies used weapons with ranges limited to hundreds of yards and could therefore witness the ensuing carnage--quite different from Gulf War II, in which incalculable numbers of Iraqi soldiers have died in air bombardments. Even if taking a formal census of the Iraqi dead were possible, it's doubtful the U.S. military would try. Americans got out of the business of counting enemy losses after the Vietnam War. Then, tallying North Vietnamese and Viet Cong casualties became something of a bureaucratic fetish, and the ludicrous methods often used--counting five body parts as five "kills," for example--destroyed U.S. credibility. The Pentagon has never released a formal estimate of how many Iraqis died in the first Gulf War in 1991. During the war in Afghanistan, General Tommy Franks, the theater commander in that campaign as well as in Gulf War II, said flatly, "We don't do body counts."

At least not formally. Some Pentagon officials, using rough accounts from the field, privately estimate that more than 10,000 Iraqi troops and up to 2,000 civilians have died so far. Approximations are possible after ground engagements, when coalition forces may make a quick battlefield walk-through to scan for the dead. Tallying destroyed vehicles and multiplying by the number of personnel it takes to operate each can also provide a crude estimate.

Still, the overall numbers are unknown, and some experts are worried that if they're ever tallied, they could come as a nasty surprise. Says William Arkin, a former Army intelligence officer and a senior military adviser for Human Rights Watch: "I think we are going to be stunned by the level of carnage caused by this war."

If so, civilian casualties may prove the most shocking. With Iraqi fighters mixing with civilians, it has been hard to distinguish between combatants and noncombatants. And highly touted smart weapons have turned out to be messier than advertised. A 2,000-lb. bomb steered by a JDAM guidance device may rarely miss its mark by more than 13 ft.--the length of the steering system and the explosive--but when the bomb blows, it sends high-speed shrapnel flying as far as a mile. There may be a lot of uncounted innocents in such a big footprint.

The fighting is only the start of the dying. A well-regarded Columbia University public-health study of the first Gulf War concluded that 3,500 civilians died in the fighting. After the shooting stopped, an additional 14,000 died of waterborne diseases as displaced populations used contaminated rivers for drinking and bathing. And 35,000 more died in postwar uprisings that Saddam Hussein suppressed. In this war too, disease and internecine violence are already being reported. On the other hand, Saddam's overthrow will spare many Iraqis from his torture chambers and from deaths due to U.N. sanctions aimed at punishing his regime, boycotts that have led to shortages of food and medicine. Of course, those numbers are also incalculable. --By Jeffrey Kluger. With reporting by Mark Thompson/Washington

With reporting by Mark Thompson/Washington