The Report
of the Iraq Inquiry
217.
The UK became
one of 15 members of the “Core Group” charged with steering
the
Geneva
Declaration process and guiding its implementation.134
218.
The
Lancet published the
second Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public
Health
cluster sample survey of excess mortality in Iraq (direct and
indirect, violent and
non‑violent
deaths) on 12 October 2006.135
The first
Johns Hopkins study had been
published
by The
Lancet in October
2004.
219.
The second
study used the same (cluster sample survey) methodology as
the
first
study, but was based on a larger sample (1,849 households as
against 988 in the
first study).
220.
The study
estimated that between March 2003 and June 2006, there had
been
654,965
excess Iraqi deaths and 601,027 excess violent Iraqi deaths as a
consequence
of the war.
The study attributed 31 percent of violent excess deaths to the
coalition,
24 percent
to “other” and 45 percent to “unknown”. The study also concluded
that levels
of violence
were increasing.
The 2004
and 2006 Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health studies
published
by
The
Lancet have been
subject to several criticisms. The most significant
are:
•
That the
baseline pre‑invasion mortality rate used by the studies was lower
than the
actual
pre‑invasion mortality rate, leading to an over‑estimation of
excess mortality
in the
post‑invasion period. The second study used a pre‑invasion
mortality rate of
5.5 deaths
per thousand people.136
The 2008
Iraq Family Health Survey (IFHS) used
a figure of
nine deaths per thousand.137
•
That the
sample sizes were too small. The 2004 Lancet
study (central
estimate
98,000
excess deaths) surveyed 988 households and the 2006
Lancet
study
(central
estimate
655,000 excess deaths) surveyed 1,849 households. The 2008
IFHS
(central
estimate 151,000 excess violent deaths) surveyed 9,345 households.
The
IFHS team
highlighted the implications of that difference in scale: “The
estimated
number of
deaths in the IFHS is about three times as high as that reported by
the
Iraq Body
Count. Both sources indicate that the 2006 study by Burnham et al
[the
second
Lancet
study]
considerably overestimated the number of violent deaths.
For
instance,
to reach the 925 violent deaths per day reported by Burnham et al
for June
2005
through June 2006, as many as 87 percent of violent deaths would
have been
missed in
the IFHS and more than 90 percent in the Iraq Body Count. This
level of
underreporting
is highly improbable, given the internal and external consistency
of
the data
and the much larger same size and quality‑control measures taken in
the
implementation
of the IFHS.”
134
Geneva
Declaration on Armed Violence and Development website,
How does it
work.
135
Burnham G,
Lafta R, Doocy S and Roberts L. Mortality after the 2003 invasion
of Iraq: a cross‑sectional
cluster
sample survey. The
Lancet 368:
1421‑1428 (2006).
136
Roberts L,
Lafta R, Garfield R, Khudhairi J and Burnham G. Mortality before
and after the 2003
invasion of
Iraq: cluster sample survey. The
Lancet 364:
1857-1864 (2004).
137
Iraq Family
Health Survey Study Group. Violence‑Related Mortality in Iraq from
2002 to 2006.
The New England
Journal of Medicine 358:
484-493 (2008).
208