How many Iraqis have been killed in the war and by Saddam Hussein?
The Iraqi government has released figures stating that 70,000 Iraqis have been killed since 2004, although as AFP reports, that's not the definitive total:
'However, the numbers are significantly lower than previous figures that cover a shorter time span, including from Iraq's own human rights ministry.The ministry said in October 2009 that 85,694 people were killed from 2004 to 2008.
And the US military's Central Command posted figures on its website in July 2010 indicating that 76,939 Iraqis, including security forces members, had been killed from January 2004 to August 2008.
Independent British website www.iraqbodycount.org says that at least 114,584 civilians were killed in violence in Iraq from the US-led invasion of 2003 through December 30, 2011.
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In a 2003 article for the New York Times, reporter John Burns tried to calculate the number of deaths Saddam Hussein was responsible for:
'Doing the arithmetic is an imprecise venture. The largest number of deaths attributable to Mr. Hussein's regime resulted from the war between Iraq and Iran between 1980 and 1988, which was launched by Mr. Hussein. Iraq says its own toll was 500,000, and Iran's reckoning ranges upward of 300,000. Then there are the casualties in the wake of Iraq's 1990 occupation of Kuwait. Iraq's official toll from American bombing in that war is 100,000 â?? surely a gross exaggeration â?? but nobody contests that thousands of Iraqi soldiers and civilians were killed in the American campaign to oust Mr. Hussein's forces from Kuwait. In addition, 1,000 Kuwaitis died during the fighting and occupation in their country.Casualties from Iraq's gulag are harder to estimate. Accounts collected by Western human rights groups from Iraqi émigrés and defectors have suggested that the number of those who have "disappeared" into the hands of the secret police, never to be heard from again, could be 200,000.
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