Magog: Unguarded
Magog: Unguarded
Swarming Around... cats living with dogs... total chaos.

Wednesday, May 14, 2003


This morning's headlines describing the latest mass grave found in Iraq prompted me to revisit the infamous Iraq Body Count project, to see how high their toll had risen as a result. Ready? Try zero. That's right, the "worldwide update of reported civilian deaths in the war on Iraq" apparently doesn't consider the thousands of corpses now being uncovered as good enough evidence. But we know they're there. Heck, we've seen them on TV, shown by the same sources used by the IBC project. So let's do a quick analysis, using mainstream media reports (similar to IBC's methodology), to see what's been found just in the past few weeks, or so:
DateMinMaxSourceComment
May 134,00015,000AP, BBCHillah / Babylon
May 12126150BBC, APnear Basra
week of May 54040BBC, APAbul Khasib, southern Iraq
week of May 57272BBC, CNNNajaf
May 33535AFPBabylon
April 211,0001,000BBC, AFPunmarked graves, Baghdad
April 171,6002,000BBC, CNNnear Kirkuk

Keep in mind that some of these are conservative estimates, and that hundreds of thousands, possibly even as many as one million (according to CNN) civilians remain unaccounted for. Also, the numbers shown here do not include mass graves found which are suspected of containing the remains of Kuwaiti and Iranian prisoners of war.

Still, it's interesting to compare this tip-of-the-iceberg range (6,873 - 18,297) with theirs (3,761 - 4,791), which exceeded even the estimates of the former Iraqi regime.

posted by Max Power | 12:57 PM
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