Casualties of war

A look at how U.S. troop casualties compare with Iraqi civilian war deathsImagine the preceding pages of dead U.S. soldiers’ names (31.3 columns of text with roughly 100 names per column) represented in the black lines below. Now, imagine what a list of the names of the Iraqi civilians who have been killed as a result of the war would look like. The grey bars below represent the additional pages we would need if we were to publish 58,418 names—that’s the most-conservative estimate of Iraqi civilian dead.

Other estimates range from 64,405 (www.iraqbodycount.org) to 650,000 (the Lancet study of excessive Iraqi mortality as a result of the war). The conservative number we have chosen represents Iraqis who have died violently as a direct result of the war: killed by bombs, U.S. troops (collateral damage), insurgents, Iraqi military and police, and assassination.