While skewering Alistair Campbell on his show, Andrew Marr said the Iraq War had killed 600.000 people. Blair’s former spin-doctor was on the ropes at the time and so did not contest the count, which Marr claimed were “internationally-accepted UN figures”. But I’m curious to find out where Marr got this count from.
Finding out how many people have died is difficult, as no Iraqi or Coalition government office regularly releases publically available statistics on Iraqi civilian deaths. I have not been able to find the supposedly authoritative UN figure Marr quoted. But the Iraqi Body Count, the world’s largest public database of violent civilian deaths during and since the 2003 invasion, puts the figure between 95,309 – 103,982 deaths. The Brookings Iraq Index similarly puts the deaths between May 2003 and August 14, 2008 at 113,616. The Associated Press puts the violent deaths at 110,600 violent deaths as of April 2009.
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