Survey: 1m Iraqis killed by US invasion

Press TV
Friday February 1, 2008

More than one million Iraqis have died as a result of the US-led invasion according to a survey by one of Britain's leading polling groups.

The survey, conducted by Opinion Research Business (ORB) with 2,414 adults in face-to-face interviews, found that 20 percent of people questioned had at least one death in their household as a result of the conflict, rather than natural causes, Antiwar.com reported.

The last complete census in Iraq conducted in 1997 found 4.05 million households in Iraq, a figure ORB used to calculate that approximately 1.03 million people had died as a result of the war.
The margin of error in the survey, conducted in August and September 2007, was 1.7 percent, giving a range of deaths of 946,258 to 1.12 million.

ORB originally found that 1.2 million people had died, but decided to go back and conduct more research in rural areas to make the survey as comprehensive as possible and then came up with the revised figure.

The research covered 15 of Iraq's 18 provinces. Those that not covered included two of Iraq's more unstable Karbala and al-Anbar regions and the northern province of Arbil, where local authorities refused ORB a permit to work.

ORB, a non-government-funded group founded in 1994, conducts research for the private, public and voluntary sectors.

The director of the group, Allan Hyde, said that the group had no objective other than to record as accurately as possible the number of deaths among the Iraqi population caused by the US invasion.