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The Report of the Iraq Inquiry
203.  IBC published A Dossier of Civilian Casualties 2003 – 2005 in July 2005.128
The dossier stated that 24,865 civilians had been reported killed in the two years from
20 March 2003 to 19 March 2005, almost all of them as a direct result of violence.
204.  Of the 13,811 fatalities for which IBC had age and gender information,
11,281 (81.7 percent) had been male (including the elderly) and 1,198 (8.7 percent) had
been female (including the elderly). A total of 1,281 (9.3 percent) had been children and
51 (0.4 percent) babies.
205.  The dossier also provided a breakdown of who had killed those civilians.
That breakdown is reproduced in the table below.
Table 1: Civilian fatalities by category
Killers by category
Number killed
Percentage
of total
1 US‑led forces alone
2 Anti‑occupation forces alone
3 Both US‑led and anti‑occupation forces involved
4 Iraqi MOH‑defined “military actions”
5 Iraqi MOH‑defined “terrorist attacks”
6 Predominantly criminal killings
7 Unknown agents
Total deaths
9,270
2,353
623
635
318
8,935
2,731
24,865
37.3
9.5
2.5
2.5
1.3
35.9
11.0
100.0
206.  The “unknown agents” category included attacks which apparently targeted only
civilians and lacked any identifiable military objective – for instance suicide bombs
in markets and mosques, or attacks apparently motivated by personal or inter‑group
vendettas. The category also included 334 individual killings where media reports
provided no clear information about the killer. This category was likely to overlap with
others.
207.  The dossier reported that 98.5 percent of deaths caused by US‑led forces were
attributable to the US and 1.5 percent of deaths were attributable to other coalition
forces including the UK.
208.  The dossier also stated that in incidents for which both death and injury information
was available, it had recorded 42,500 injuries (of all kinds) against 13,424 deaths, a ratio
of over 3 to 1.
128  Iraq Body Count, July 2005, A Dossier of Civilian Casualties 2003 – 2005.
206
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