Baghdad,January 04 :About 162,000 people, almost 80% of them civilians, have been killed in Iraq from the start of the 2003 US-led invasion up to withdrawal of American forces in 2011, a British NGO has said.
Iraq Body Count (IBC) warned that, contrary to apparent trends in figures released by the Iraqi government, the level of violence has changed little from mid-2009.
The organisation, however, revealed that attacks were markedly down from when the country was in the throes of sectarian war in 2006 and 2007, The Sydney Morning Herald reports.
It said about 79% of the fatalities were civilians, while the remainder included US soldiers, Iraqi security forces and insurgents.
“The violence peaked in late 2006 but was sustained at high levels until the second half of 2008 – nearly 90% of the deaths occurred by 2009,” IBC said in a statement.
“Recent trends indicate a persistent low-level conflict in Iraq that will continue to kill civilians at a similar rate for years to come. While these data indicate no improvement, time will tell whether the withdrawal of US forces will have an effect on casualty levels,” it added.
IBC said it had recorded over 114,000 civilian deaths in Iraq since the invasion, and said the addition of figures from US military logs published by whistleblower website WikiLeaks, as well as officially recorded US and Iraqi security deaths and insurgent tolls, put the overall figure at 162,000.
According to the report, the worst non-civilian group affected were the Iraqi police, with 9019 reported deaths, and Baghdad was the most dangerous city in the country, with half of the recorded deaths, equating to 2.5 times the national average.
The organisation also revealed that a total of 4474 US soldiers died in Iraq in the nine-year conflict.
The NGO’s overall toll was totally different from what the Iraqi government published. It said on Sunday that 2645 people were killed in violence in 2011, compared to IBC’s toll of 4059.