Wikileaks War Data Reveal Underreporting of Iraqi Civilian Casualties
A Guest Beneblog by Anita Gohdes, Jeff Klingner, Megan Price and Patrick Ball The recent release of almost 400,000 secret US military files on the war in Iraq through Wikileaks has attracted wide media coverage . These documents, officially known as the significant acts database (SIGACTS), add new insights to the ongoing debate on how many casualties have occurred in Iraq since the beginning of the war. The unofficial Iraq Body Count (IBC) , which tracks civilian casualties in Iraq based on press reports and administrative records, has initiated a comparison of their own data to the deaths documented in the SIGACTS data. In a commendable effort, they are recoding the SIGACTS data to correct coding errors and in order to match it with their own database. They have estimated that the SIGACTS describes 15,000 civilian deaths previously undocumented by IBC (BBC’s report is here ). Most of these previously-unknown deaths occurred in small incidents, in which 1-3 people were killed...