Wartime Estimates of Iraqi Civilian Casualties

Volume 89 Number 868 December 2007 Wartime estimates of Iraqi civilian casualties Beth Osborne Daponte* Beth Osborne Daponte, Ph.D., is senior research scholar at the Institution for Social and Policy Studies, Yale University. Abstract Challenges exist when making reliable and valid estimates of civilian mortality due to war. This article first discusses a framework used to examine war’s impact on civilians and then considers challenges common to each statistical approach taken to estimate civilian casualties. It examines the different approaches that have been used to estimate civilian casualties associated with the recent fighting in Iraq to date and compares the results of different approaches. The author concludes by proposing that after fighting has ceased, other approaches to estimating Iraqi civilian mortality, such as post-war retrospective surveys and demographic analysis, should be employed. During wartime, the public and policymakers legitimately thirst for figures on the war’s civilian death toll due to the war’s direct violent and indirect health effects on a population. In real time, the public wants to know ‘‘How many have died?’’ However, with few exceptions until relatively recently, demographers and epidemiologists have not applied their expertise to making rigorous, credible estimates of the mortality and morbidity impacts of conflict on populations during wartime. Sometimes a lack of professional freedom prevents those who are perhaps most familiar with data on the suffering population (e.g., analysts whose livelihoods depend on the government(s) directly involved in the conflict) from becoming engaged in the discussion of the conflict’s impact. But barring professional freedom issues, wartime circumstances pose other challenges to making civilian casualty estimates. * The author thanks William Arkin and other participants in the February 2006 Conference on Casualties and Warfare, held by the Triangle Institute for Security Studies at Duke University, for comments on a previous version of this paper, as well as Anthony Smith, Jr, for his comments on an earlier draft. 943 B. Osborne Daponte – Wartime estimates of Iraqi civilian casualties This article discusses challenges in making reliable and valid estimates of civilian mortality (hereinafter referred to as casualties) due to war. It first discusses a framework used to examine war’s impact on civilians, and then considers challenges common to every statistical approach taken to estimate civilian casualties. After examining the different approaches that have been used to estimate civilian casualties in Iraq, the article finally recommends another approach that could be taken – a post-war survey. The approaches considered – tallying, a statistical sampling approach in the midst of war, and a post-war survey, show that every approach to estimating casualties provides imperfect statistics and users must consider the shortfalls of each approach when considering the veracity of estimates that arise from each. A framework for estimating war’s short-term impact on populations In 1993, Daponte proposed a framework for estimating the short-term impact of a war on a population.1 She disaggregated the mortality impact of war, using the 1991 Persian Gulf War as a case study, into five categories: N deaths of military personnel during the war; N civilian deaths caused by the war’s direct effects; N civilian deaths from the war’s indirect effects on the civilian population; N civilian deaths due to post-war violence and upheaval; and N military deaths due to post-war violence and upheaval. By disaggregating the problem, one could arrive at a methodology and data sources appropriate for the particular category of mortality. Considering the mortality category of civilian deaths due to the war’s indirect effects on the civilian population, Daponte argued that this category of mortality could be deduced by examining the number of deaths that result from population projections run under two scenarios – a no war scenario where the population continues on the demographic trajectory that it was on prior to the war, and a war scenario, where one takes into account the increased mortality mostly due to the damage to the infrastructure and unplanned population movements. In the field of programme evaluation, one estimates the impact of an intervention on a unit of analysis by analysing data both before and after the intervention, and compares that either to a control group or to counterfactual information on the unit of analysis. The quasi-experimental design2 typically used, applied to a war situation, would be: 1 Beth Osborne Daponte, ‘‘A case study in estimating casualties from war and its aftermath: The 1991 Persian Gulf War’’, PSR Quarterly 3 (2) (1993), pp. 57–66. 2 Thomas Cook and Donald Campbell, Quasi-Experimentation: Design and Analysis Issues for Field Settings, Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1979. 944 Volume 89 Number 868 December 2007 where O represents observations or outcomes and X represents the intervention of the war. One would deduce the impact of the war by using neighbouring countries as a ‘‘control’’ group or by making statements about what the population characteristics of the country at war would have been had the war not occurred. The first challenge in applying such a framework is in clearly defining the intervention of ‘‘war’’. In the current Iraq case, the war began on 19 March 2003. However, on 14 April 2003 the US military declared ‘‘major fighting’’ over, and on 1 May 2003 the United States declared an end to major combat operations. On 22 May 2003 the UN Security Council approved a resolution lifting economic sanctions, so up until that point the ‘‘intervention’’ included war plus sanctions. Thus in making estimates on wartime mortality, one must be careful and explicit as to exactly how one defines the ‘‘war’’ period. The framework that Daponte proposed may not be cleanly applied when the ‘‘war’’ period and the ‘‘post-war’’ period cannot be clearly delineated. Second, in the quasi-experimental design above, the intervention is the only intervention applied to the population. But in reality, there can be many interventions that occur concurrently. In Iraq, disentangling the impact of war from sanctions can be impossible. For example, the UN Development Programme (UNDP) wrote on the topic of infrastructure and sufficiency issues that Extensive use for more than twenty years, sanctions during the 1990s, misguided economic policies and three wars in Iraq have contributed to the deterioration, damage and negligence of both the development and maintenance of infrastructure and services. After the most recent war, the situation worsened due to looting, destruction of public property, and general insecurity.3 Thus disentangling deaths due to the war from those due to other factors can be impossible and beyond expertise of most statisticians and demographers. Perhaps the best that the statisticians and demographers can do is to provide estimates of the mortality levels of civilians at different time periods, and let the political scientists argue about the proportion of the increase in mortality that should be attributed to different parties and policies. 3 Iraq Living Conditions Survey 2004, United Nations Development Programme and Central Organization for Statistics and Information Technology, Ministry of Development Cooperation, Baghdad, Iraq, April 2005, available at http://www.iq.undp.org/Default.aspx (last visited 4 February 2008), Vol. II, Analytical Report, p. 16. 945 B. Osborne Daponte – Wartime estimates of Iraqi civilian casualties Third, the high-quality population data needed to make credible estimates or to put estimates in perspective may be lacking – data may not be available due to its new ‘‘sensitive nature’’, may never have been collected (sometimes the case in developing nations), or the war may have made the data that do exist obsolete (e.g. due to refugee movements). In spite of these challenges, analysts have made estimates of the impact of the war on civilians using two approaches: tallies and demographic surveys on a sample of the population. Each of these approaches is considered in turn. Tallies of civilian deaths Theoretically, one can obtain an estimate of the number of deaths from violence or the direct effects of the war (e.g. bombings, violence, but excluding war’s indirect health effects) by adding up the number of deaths that occur in incidents of violence. This approach is susceptible to error from both double-counting and undercounting incidents of violence, and also by mis-estimating the number of people who died in each incident. Further, while the number of immediate deaths from an incident might be known, it may be difficult to follow people injured in the incident to determine how many later died from injuries suffered in the incident. Without follow-up, only the civilians who died immediately from the incident will be included in such a data set and the data set will yield an underestimate of deaths from incidents. A reliable and valid tally depends on having a reliable source of information. Such a source of information cannot have double-counts of incidents, must not omit any incidents, and must accurately count the number of deaths associated with each incident. In practice, such a data source is unobtainable in times of war. However, the lack of a perfect data source has not prevented analysts from using a tallying approach. Perhaps the best known example of the tally approach being used in Iraq today is Iraq Body Count’s work.4 Iraq Body Count (hereinafter IBC) aims to tally civilian deaths from violence that have occurred during the current war in Iraq. IBC has created a data set of wartime deaths, based on incidents of violence and mortality reported by a wide range of media outlets. Thus their data set essentially reflects the accuracy and comprehensiveness of media reports. If there is no double-counting and if the facts of the incidents included in the data set are reported correctly, then since the media reports may not be comprehensive, the tally from the data set represents a minimum number of deaths.

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