100,000 excess civilian Iraqi deaths since war

The rise in the death rate was mainly due to violence and much of it was caused by US air strikes on towns and cities.

"Making conservative assumptions, we think that about 100,000 excess deaths, or more have happened since the 2003 invasion of Iraq," said Les Roberts of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in a report p}blished online by The Lancet medical journal.

"The use of air power in areas with lots of civilians appears to be killing a lot of women and children," Roberts told Reuters.

The report came just days before the US presidential election in which the Iraq war has been a major issue.

Mortality was already high in Iraq before the war because of United Nations sanctions blocking food and medical imports but the researchers described what they found as shocking.

The new figures are based on surveys done by the researchers in Iraq in September :004. They compared Iraqi deaths during 14.6 months before the invasion in March 2003 and the 17.8 months after it by conducting household surveys in randomly selected neighbourhoods.

Previous estimates based on think tank and media sources put the Iraqi civilian death toll at up to 16,053 and military fatalities as high as 6,370.

By comparison about 849 US military were killed in combat or attacks and another 258 died in accidents or incidents not related to fighting, according to the Pentagon.

The researchers blamed air strikes for many of the deaths.

"What we have evidence of is the use of air power in populated urban areas and the bad consequences of it," Roberts said.

Gilbert Burnham, who collaborated on the research, said US military action in Iraq was "very bad for Iraqi civilians."

AFP adds: British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said Friday his government would study "in a very serious way" a report that around 100,000 civilians in Iraq had died as a result of the March 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq.

"This is a very high estimate, indeed," Straw told BBC radio.