The count supplied by the Health Ministry is triple the figures that so far have been endorsed by the Baghdad government, but only one-fourth of an estimate put forward by an English journal.
Baghdad (AsiaNews) Between 100,000 and 150,000 civilians have been killed in Iraq since the start of the war in March 2003, said Iraq's health minister, Ali al-Shamari, during a visit to Vienna. This figure is far more than previously accepted figures.
In fact, it is triple the amounts supplied so far by off-the-record Iraqi sources and by the media no official count was ever made but only about one-fourth of the 650,000 deaths speculated in research carried out by the UK medical journal, "Lancet". The Lancet statistics were contested by both the Iraqi authorities and US military.
The US army has in the past contested figures supplied by the Iraqi Health Ministry, accusing it of inflating numbers of victims and tracing the false propaganda information back to extremists of Moqtada al-Sadr that control the department.
The head of the Baghdad central mortuary said he was receiving up to 60 victims of violent death each day. But the ministry put the national death toll at an average of 75 to 80 per day, "but in some cases it goes far beyond".
The most common causes of death are attacks, clashes, terrorist crimes and common crimes and calculations are based mostly on obituary lists.