The Iraq Body Count (IBC) estimate for the Baghdad portion of the 23rd May
2004 Associated
Press (AP) survey of Iraqi morgues was made possible by examination of
the detailed data supplied to AP by the morgues, in which the statistics
were broken down by region and by month. IBC has previously covered the Baghdad
morgue for the period from mid-April through September 2003, recorded in
IBC entries x132 & x172. The current
entry, x334, only provides totals for October 2003 through
March 2004, so that it only needs to draw upon a six-month portion of AP's
12-month report.
The "raw" statistics for this period were then adjusted as follows:
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To allow for the sentence in the reports which reads "Also, the bodies
of killed fighters from groups like the al-Mahdi Army are rarely taken to
morgues," an estimate of "between 1 in 50 to 1 in 25" was
used to represent the "rare" presence of fighters in the morgue
statistics. AP's Baghdad figure was accordingly reduced by 4 per cent and
2 percent to produce "fighter-free" minimum and maximum estimates.
-
These numbers were further reduced by morgue data for the equivalent 2002-2003
periods (and locations) to provide an adjustment for normal "background" death
rates unattributable to the war and its aftermath. It is only the difference
between the pre- and post-invasion rates which are recorded here.
-
Deaths which may already have been recorded by IBC from other reporting for
the locations and periods concerned were subtracted from the totals obtained
after step 2 to avoid overlaps and double-counting (See the "Details..." note
to x073 for an example of the Methodology used in such
instances).
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We also allowed for the statement from the director of statistics at the
Baghdad morgue that "The figure [reported by the morgue] does not
include most people killed in big terrorist bombings": Where there
were existing, potentially-overlapping records of this nature identified
in step 3, above, those overlaps were reduced by "half+1" for
overlaps smaller than 10 and by 60 per cent for larger ones — "60
per cent" being our interpretation of the term "most" as
used here.
As noted by AP, absent from this data are records from morgues which did not
participate in or respond to AP's survey — it should not therefore
be considered comprehensive.