The great unsolved mystery of the Iraqi war is that there has never been a single reliable or substantiated report of a single Iraqi military casualty. It is not known whether there are a few thousand, or many tens of thousands buried in mass graves.
General Tommy Franks, infamously said: “We don’t do body counts.”

An estimate for Media reported civilian deaths in Iraq since Jan 2003, between 11793 & 13802, is given by Iraq Body Count [1], a group of acedemics. These are civialian deaths reported by two or more independent approved news sources. This is only a sample of the true deaths, because most civilian casualties go unreported by the media. The maximum and minimum arise from independent eye-witnesses differing in the number of casualties observed for the same incident.

The true figure for civilian deaths could be: 15,000, 20,000 or 50,000?

However, the number of coalition casualties is quite precise [2]. Since April 2003 a total of 1,110 coalition troops have died, an average of 2 per day, and includes 979 US, 65 British and 66 Other. These figures are released by the military and thought to be accurate, although the numbers wouned may be lower than the actual:
3,076 US wounded in Action Return to Duty within 72 hours
3,840 US wounded in Action Not Return to Duty.

This month the number of US fatalities will rise above the one thousand which may have a significant political impact in the US. If readers have any idea how to approcah the problem of determining Iraqi military casualties, or could point to reports from the initial invasion, I would be pleased to hear.

[1] Iraq Body Count  http://www.iraqbodycount.net
[2] Iraq Coalition Casualty Count  http://icasualties.org