The U.K.-based Iraq Body Count (IBC) is the premier
organization for tracking deaths and violence in Iraq. Since its founding in
2002, it has kept a running count of the casualties caused by the Iraq War,
which is constantly updated. Its work has also been included in various
studies, and is a constant reminder of the costs of the conflict there. This is
an interview with two members of IBC, Hamit Dardagan and Josh Dougherty.
1.
What was the impetus for creating Iraq Body Count (IBC), and what year did it
start?
The principal impetus for starting IBC in late 2002 was to
ensure that the deaths of civilians in the forthcoming war would stay firmly in
public view, remain a prominent part of debate and discussion about the war,
and be considered soberly and appropriately. More specifically, it was to
ensure that the cumulative number of reported civilian deaths would become an
accessible part of the public record.
A notable, but not untypical, example of discussion detached
from any pertinent data was Tony Blair’s eve-of-war statement to the U.K.
Parliament that “[Saddam Hussein] will be responsible for many, many more
deaths even in one year than we will be in any conflict.” This might or might
not have been true according to the best evidence available at the time, but to
make a quantitative claim without so much as mentioning any relevant data is
surely unacceptable, and all the more so when so much is at stake for those
affected. Indeed, our data proved Blair’s unsupported claim to have been simply
false. More civilians were killed in just the first two months of the war in
2003 than were killed by Saddam Hussein’s government in the year before, or
indeed for many years before. One would have to go back at least to the early
1990s to find any plausible evidence for deaths on a similar or greater scale.
Blair’s claim went mostly unquestioned, but, given that it dealt with an
essentially numerical question was of the sort that would not have been
permissible for a politician to make without closer examination if it had been
about, say, taxation.
One of the ways in which IBC has developed since that time is
our recognition that no one else, currently, is fulfilling this role with the
same rigor, at least not publicly. Thus from a role, which has been primarily
directed at the West, we are now moving to one that recognizes our potential
role as the source of record for Iraqis too, and will shortly introduce an
Arabic translated version of the site that takes us more visibly in this
direction.
2.
How does IBC collect its information on deaths in Iraq?
We primarily collect our data from online news media or other
publicly available reporting sources, supplemented by official records where
and when these become available. This needs to be done 7 days a week. From
these reports we extract not just the numbers killed and injured, but a range
of detailed variables such as the location, time and date, weapons used,
perpetrators, victim demographics such as age and sex, profession and marital
status, and name; all wherever possible, of course, as these things are not
always reported.
Surprisingly, perhaps, we have some demographic information on
at least 42% of the dead, and the weapons involved for 93% of incidents. One of
the most important pieces of information that is still woefully limited is the
victim name; currently this is recorded for less than 8% of the dead.
One might think that once a death or a particular violent
incident is reported by the press, it’s in the record, but because there are so
many such reports, spread across so many different sources, particularly when
the violence is at elevated levels, with the latest news pushing yesterday’s
aside, or after a week or so, totally overwhelming it, it is all too easy to
lose track or confuse events with others.
Very soon the scale and number of these incidents is lost from
view, and for ordinary news consumers at least, all that’s really noticeable
are the most unusual or large-scale events. And individual news agencies never
manage to comprehensively cover all reported deaths. Generally it’s just those
within their own network of correspondents and contacts.
So there are two kinds of biases that we have to work against:
the first is the editorial impetus to push ‘regular’, unremarkable news such as
the violent death of, say, a single, ordinary Iraqi into obscure corners of the
press. It’s reported, but demoted to the “inner pages” in print terms, or
hidden many paragraphs into an article. This is the main reason why an ordinary
news consumer will be astonished to learn that, provided you go looking for it,
and have access to subscription news databases such as Lexis-Nexis, much more
is reported about Iraqi deaths than one would imagine.
The second bias is that the press more consistently reports
larger incidents than smaller ones. Thus there is essentially blanket coverage
by the local and Iraq based international media of larger-scale events, but
when incidents are smaller, and involve fewer deaths, the coverage becomes more
patchy. One therefore needs to monitor as full as possible a range of sources
and reports, and carefully combine them to provide a more comprehensive
picture, paying due attention to potential errors such as double counting.
It is our view, based on years of painstaking engagement with
this work and close review of its limitations, that, at least where Iraq is
concerned, it is in the main only incidents where a very small number of
persons were killed that are likely to have been completely missed. The importance
of this depends on how many of the deaths occur in this way, how quickly this
coverage tails off at the smaller incident sizes, and whether there are cumulative
sources available such as monthly reports from morgues or hospitals that are
unaffected by incident size.
What is also certain is that finding all these reports, and
stitching them all together, is not easy. As we’ve discovered, it takes a
dedicated research effort to pull all this data together, and something much
more rigorous than an ordinary monitoring of the news to extract and organize
each item of useful information contained in that reporting.
3.
What separates IBC from other groups that publish death counts such as the
Iraqi government or icasualties used to do is that the numbers are constantly
updated. Can you explain some of the process behind that?
I would say that the sharpest distinction between IBC and the
data on casualties released by the Iraqi government, typically published simply
as monthly totals, is that we continually publish disaggregated data specifying
the time, place, and a systematic description of each deadly incident, with the
number of people killed or whose bodies were found in each case. Of course,
IBC’s data can be totaled at the end of every month to produce monthly numbers,
but the user of our figures can look much deeper than this, and see what they
are based on.
Given that IBC’s monthly figures have usually been higher than
those released by the Iraqi government, for theirs to be correct and ours to be
wrong, specific incidents in our database would have to have never occurred, or
many incidents would have to have had lower death tolls than reported, which is
all quite unlikely. Basically our figures are transparent enough to be
verifiable, which is arguably one of the reasons they are taken seriously.
Aggregate figures are much more impenetrable. We don’t know what specific
deaths or incidents are included in them. For all we know, there could even be
some deaths in the lower government totals that are not present in IBC, but
without incident by incident listing, there is just no way to know.
By contrast to government figures, iCasualties, one of whose
two co-founders took inspiration from IBC does publish disaggregated
information like we do. Unlike us, their focus has primarily been on tracking
and listing deaths among US and Coalition military forces. While they do also
provide a listing of Iraqi casualties, it’s been my understanding that this has
been more a secondary part of their project, which does not attempt to cover a
wide range of reporting sources or claim to be a comprehensive record of
reported deaths. As such, every time I have checked their site, their Iraqi
civilians totals were lower than IBC’s for any given month. Perhaps a more
important distinction is that iCasualties does not extract or present the range
of other variables, such as listed in answer to Question 2 above, which
thorough information-extraction process explains the 2-week or so delay before
our formal data is published.
Much of the value of IBC’s work has not been in compiling an
accumulated number, but in tracking all the associated information about
victims and incidents, such as their age and sex, the location of their killing,
and the weapons that killed them. These have formed the basis of several
scientific papers published in major journals, co-authored by IBC and other
researchers, which provide new insight into the human impact of the war in Iraq
and perhaps other modern conflicts as well.
The constant updating, which I’m pleased you noticed, is
important to IBC both as a means of underlining the fact that the violence
itself is ongoing, which our data merely reflects, but also as part of the
transparency we try to bring to the process: it is easier to trace recent facts
than very old ones.
4.
How did the Wikileaks release of Iraq war related documents affect IBC’s
casualty figures?
There is no question that the WikiLeaks data has contributed
greatly to public knowledge and understanding of the war’s impact on Iraqis.
First, we estimated after an initial analysis of the documents that they would
add around 15,000 previously unreported Iraqi civilian deaths to our total. We
have formally added over 3,300 of these deaths to our database so far (listed
here:
http://www.iraqbodycount.org/database/incidents/list/wl2012),
and this work continues. In addition to what they contribute in terms of
numbers, the records also contain a wide range of specific details about
particular incidents and victims, including thousands of victim’s names, which
adds considerably to our understanding of the pervasive, day-to-day tragedies
that have occurred throughout this war.
The WikiLeaks data also confirmed that as far as our other
sources are concerned, it is primarily some of the smaller incidents that they
tend to miss. We are finding that it is only incidents of this kind that we are
able to add to our database from the logs.
5.
IBC not only keeps aggregate numbers for those killed in Iraq, but tries to
keep track of people’s names that lost their lives as well. Why is that
important?
The importance of names can scarcely be overstated. One need
only look at almost any war memorial to
understand this. It must always be remembered that we are not dealing simply
with interchangeable units or numbers on a balance sheet, but rather individual
human beings with unique lives and identities. Names help keep this perspective
at the forefront. There are also technical reasons, such as the ability to
differentiate between victims with greater reliability, for the bereaved to
know the fate of loved ones who are presumed missing, and for those who are
still missing to be correctly identified as such, that is, that they remain
truly unaccounted for. But one of the main goals for any history of a war must
be to treat its human losses in the appropriate manner; to record not just how
many died, as important as this is, but who
died.
6.
There were several surveys early on in the Iraq war such as by ORB and the two
published in the Lancet journal that estimated hundreds of thousands up to one
million deaths in Iraq. What was Iraq Body Count’s opinion of those reports?
We think the surveys published about Iraq have been rather a
mixed bag. The most credible have been the Iraq Living Conditions Survey (2005)
by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), and the Iraq Family Health
Survey (2008) by the World Health Organization (WHO). Both have produced
estimates that are higher than the corresponding IBC numbers over the periods
covered, but within at least a plausible range. The surveys published by the
Lancet (2006) and the polling group ORB (2007) are, however, clearly very large
overestimates in our view.
We discussed some of our initial skepticism of the 2006 Lancet
estimate shortly after it was published here:
http://www.iraqbodycount.org/analysis/beyond/reality-checks/.
Since that time, there have also been multiple academic papers and other
analyses that have been critical of that survey and called its findings into
question for a variety of reasons. Taken together, we think it’s clear that
that survey was simply wrong, and by a large margin. As for the ORB poll
(2007), this was never taken as seriously as something like the Lancet survey,
as its estimate was derived from a fairly crude opinion poll better suited to
other purposes, and was not published in a serious journal. But it did
initially make some public impact, perhaps in part because it seemed to
somewhat ‘corroborate’ the very high estimate of the Lancet survey, and quite
likely also because “a million” is an attention-grabbing and memorable number.
However, a closer look indicates that the ORB poll was also a very big
overestimate, and of insufficient quality to provide reliable corroboration
whatever its findings. The problems with the ORB poll were discussed in detail
in a paper co-authored by a member of the IBC team here:
https://ojs.ub.uni-konstanz.de/srm/article/view/2373.
7.
Violence in Iraq has gone through trends from the initial invasion, to
terrorism immediately afterward, to the civil war period, to the current one.
What is the leading cause of death in Iraq these days, and is that the same or
different from the civil war years?
I’d like to suggest that you and your readers answer this
question for yourselves, using a tool we’ve produced – and haven’t really a
good name for yet – that allows you to specify weapons, time-frames, provinces,
and a number of other variables, and produce a graph (or download the
comma-separated data) to this or other questions on matters for which we’ve
collected formal data that allows descriptive statistics.
We’re still working on this tool to make it more detailed, but
the point is to allow readers to perform their own investigations, realising
that people have other interests than those which strike us as most important.
Of course when there are trends which we find noteworthy we will continue to
point these out, but as we’re dealing with a very large data set there is a lot
of scope for people to explore it along the lines that most concern them.
The latest version of the tool is at
http://www.iraqbodycount.org/analysis/numbers/2012/
8.
IBC has deaths going up for the last three years, yet said in its year-end
analysis for 2012 that security was largely unchanged. Can you explain that?
We see the security situation as largely unchanged because the
changes have been relatively small over the last three years. Actually, over
the last four years each year has fallen within a pretty narrow band of between
4-5,000 deaths, much narrower than changes across previous years of the war.
It’s highly unlikely that any two years will have the exact same number of
deaths, so it’s mostly a matter of what degree of change is sizable enough to
consider a significant change in the situation on the ground rather than just
statistical ‘noise’. For example, the change in our totals for 2010-2011 is
from 4,073 to 4,137. While that is indeed “going up” in an absolute sense, the
difference is far too small to consider a national trend. It must also be
remembered that simple variations in reporting patterns, rather than changes in
the violence, or that having just a few more or a few less big bombings in one
year than the next, could account for small changes in totals. The change
between 2011-2012 is somewhat larger than 2010-2011, but still much smaller
than previous notable changes in yearly levels across the war. Thus we note the
increase in 2012, but viewed broadly, we don’t see this as clearly indicating
any significant change in the general security situation across the country.
One point we need to always make in these discussions of
trends, lest they become too abstract, is that of course, once one removes the
“abstraction layer” of applying an annual or other time-frame, then 4,000 vs
4,073 deaths is not an “improvement” on the latter number: it simply represents
4,000 more people who have been
killed and can hardly be considered an improvement on the previous state of
affairs for those new victims and the bereaved. Deaths unfortunately can only
ever be cumulative.
9. Finally, the Iraqi government’s figures and IBC’s
have been going in opposite directions for a little over a year now with the
official numbers decreasing. Can you explain the difference in statistics?
We can’t, for the reasons touched on above. Without seeing the
disaggregated incident-level data, there’s no way to tell what deaths we have
that they do not, or vice versa. If we view the different totals as implying
that their figures are challenging ours – that our figures are somehow too high
– there’s no way to tell which of the deaths in our totals are being ‘disputed’
in the first place, and so no way to resolve the dispute. Moreover, there has
been no clear methodology described for the data that’s been released by the
government in recent years. It is reported as being compiled from data from the
ministries of Health, Interior and Defense, but that’s basically the full
extent of what is known. The underlying practice of how this is done, and
therefore what might account for something like deaths going unrecorded,
remains impossible to determine. What we can say is that we stand behind our
numbers, which by contrast can be examined in
detail, and think that whatever the precise explanation for these
discrepancies, that explanation will primarily involve some unspecified
limitation of the methods being used to produce the Iraqi government’s monthly
figures.
SOURCES
Iraq Body Count,
“Iraqi deaths from violence in 2012,” 1/1/13
