WASHINGTON — More than 600,000 Iraqis have died violently since the U.S.-led invasion, according to a new estimate that is far higher than any other to date.
The report, by a team of researchers criticized for its death estimates two years ago, says that 601,027 Iraqis have suffered violent deaths since the March 2003 invasion. It also suggests that the country has become more violent in the last year.
"This clearly is a much higher number than many people have been thinking about," said Gilbert Burnham, the report's lead author and a professor at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University. "It shows the violence has spread across the country."
Iraq's violent death rate rose from 3.2 deaths per 1,000 people in the year after the invasion to 12 per 1,000 from June 2005 to June 2006, according to the researchers, whose findings are being published this week in the British medical journal Lancet.
Most of the deaths reported in the study are of military-age men. But Burnham said it was impossible to differentiate among civilians, insurgents and members of the Iraqi security forces.
He said he expected criticism of the study, which grapples with an issue that is sensitive to U.S. and British officials: the undetermined number of war-related deaths.
The same group of researchers conducted a study in 2004 that placed the number of deaths caused by the war at about 100,000. British and American officials questioned its methodology and said it vastly overstated fatalities.
The Pentagon reported in August that the number of civilian casualties had increased sharply, but it did not quantify them.
Pentagon officials did not comment Tuesday on the latest study's numbers and referred questions on civilian deaths to the Iraqi Health Ministry. But Lt. Col. Mark Ballesteros, a Pentagon spokesman, said the U.S. took care to avoid civilian casualties, whereas insurgents deliberately targeted civilians.
Some groups, such as Human Rights Watch, were skeptical of the previous estimate made by the Johns Hopkins researchers. But Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of Human Rights Watch's Middle East division, said her group had no reason to question the accuracy of the new survey.
"If there is surprise about the size of the figure, it has more to do with our existing death tolls," Whitson said. "The conventional wisdom is based on shoddy information."
