Accodring to a poll conducted by Opinion Research Business, UK, more than 1,000,000 Iraqi citizens have been killed since the invasion took place in 2003. An earlier estimate published in the Lancet in October 2006, suggested almost half this number (654,965 deaths), but was still attacked as too high.

ORB has been tracking public opinion in Iraq since 2005 and with their Iraqi fieldwork agency, polled a representative group of 1,461 adults aged 18

•Results were based face-to-face interviews amongst a nationally representative sample of 1720 adults aged 18+ throughout Iraq.
•The standard margin of error on the sample size was +2.4%
•The methodology uses multi-stage random probability sampling and covers fifteen of the eighteen governorates within Iraq. For security reasons Karbala and Al Anbar were not included. Irbil was excluded as the authorities refused our field team a permit.
•Interviews were conducted August 12th – 19th 2007.

More at Opinion Research Business.

Criticism of the figures and criticism of the critics:

Quote:

“ditto with air strikes: 116,000 deaths (mostly unnoticed despite insurgent/militia/anti-occupation incentives to publicize them) and 132,000 injuries from air strikes. Given the nature of aerial bombardment, does this under-reporting or ratio make sense?

first point first: if do not accept the main result of a poll, do NOT bother with subresults!

or the other way round: imagine, if they had the bomb dead wrong by 50%! oops, next to zero effect on totals!

there are airstrikes in Iraq every day. after over 1000 days of war, the number of dead is rather low. and the majority of “air strike dead” might still have happened during the initial invasion.

http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/62511/

A few other strange things from the detailed tables on ORB’s website:

one more other strange things, from observing “iraq death toll critics”: the majority of you has some serious lack in basic statistics!

1. It looks like they oversampled Baghdad relative to its share of the population. This could be important in pushing numbers up.

please, try to find out, what “oversampling” is. hint: it has something to do with SUBSAMPLES, that you are interested in. please assume, that the O.R.B. guys do HAVE some basic statistical understanding.

http://www.opinion.co.uk/who-we-are.aspx

2. Anbar is not included (as far as I can tell from the table listing provinces). Strange.

reading statistics, requires basic simple reading skills. in the article that Tim linked to, they explain that they ignored Anbar, because it was too dangerous!

http://www.opinion.co.uk/Newsroom_details.aspx?NewsId=78

4. They also interviewed a disproportionate share of non-Muslims (only 45% of respondents were “Muslim” overall and 28% percent in Baghdad — the reset where orthodox, catholic, protestant, etc.).

please explain: what line in what table, did you take that information from?

http://www.opinion.co.uk/Documents/TABLES.pdf

5. The study suggests a lot of movement/displacement. External refugee flows probably mean that ORBs baseline population estimate for Iraq is too high, and internal displacement has probably increased the average size of remaining households as people flee to live with relatives. Together, this would alter the total number of estimated households in Iraq downward and increase the average household size — suggesting the ORB estimate is probably skewed high.

wow. you really expect movement, death and displacement to bias numbers upwards?

instead of assuming, that those displaced might be the ones, who suffered the worst casualties? and will not be polled, because they are in a camp or abroad?

For all these reasons, it would be good to know more about the methodology here.

for all this reasons: i seriously doubt, that you are the right person, to challenge their methodology.”

More on the methodology and its critics at Deltoid

via Daily Kos.