Study Puts War's Iraqi Death Tally at More Than 600,000 - Los Angeles Times

Study Puts War's Iraqi Death Tally at More Than 600,000 - Los Angeles Times: "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."