Not as Widely Reported As it Should Be.

Something to think about on the eve of the State of the Union address; the death toll in Iraq among the "Coalition of the Willing", civillian contractors, and of course Iraqi citizens as compiled by the BBC:


The Iraq Coalition Casualty Count also estimates 309 civilian contractors have been killed in Iraq, while according to the International News Safety Institute, 101 journalists and support staff have died there.

There is not a widely accepted equivalent figure for the number of Iraqi civilian deaths. Estimates have varied between 10,000 and 100,000. The US and UK governments say the chaos in the war-torn country has made it impossible to gain accurate information.

One organisation, the UK-based Iraq Body Count, used media reports as the basis of a dossier that estimated the civilian death toll from March 2003 to March 2005 at 24,865. But some critics have questioned the groups' methods of compiling statistics, and the Iraqi government described the dossier as "mistaken".