'New' Study: More than 1,000,000 Iraqis murdered

Strangely, in contrast the the older study in the Lancet that reported 654,965 deaths, this new study has received almost no media attention.

September 2007 - More than 1,000,000 Iraqis murdered In the week in which General Patraeus reports back to US Congress on the impact the recent ‘surge’ is having in Iraq, a new poll reveals that more than 1,000,000 Iraqi citizens have been murdered since the invasion took place in 2003. Previous estimates, most noticeably the one published in the Lancet in October 2006, suggested almost half this number (654,965 deaths). These findings come from a poll released today by ORB, the British polling agency that has been tracking public opinion in Iraq since 2005. In conjunction with their Iraqi fieldwork agency a representative sample of 1,499 adults aged 18+ answered the following question:- QHow many members of your household, if any, have died as a result of the conflict in Iraq since 2003 (ie as a result of violence rather than a natural death such as old age)? Please note that I mean those who were actually living under your roof. None 78% One 16% Two 5% Three 1% Four or more 0.002% Given that from the 2005 census there are a total of 4,050,597 households this data suggests a total of 1,220,580 deaths since the invasion in 2003. Calculating the affect from the margin of error we believe that the range is a minimum of 733,158 to a maximum of 1,446,063 Full Article...

IMO the method of questioning in this study is very valid though I don't know the reliability of applying the found figures to the whole country. More research is definitely needed. It's unbelievable that numbers of these go virtually unnoticed and most people still go by the Iraq Body Count number (73,922 – 80,560 ATM) which only counts the cases documented in the media. Giving meaning to these high numbers is hard, but it's higher than the death toll from Rwanda though not as genocidal, more sectarian. Much higher than the number of people dying in Darfur.