BAGHDAD — Iraq’s government has recorded 87,215 of its citizens killed since 2005 in violence ranging from catastrophic bombings to execution-style slayings, according to government statistics obtained by The Associated Press that break open one of the most closely guarded secrets of the war.
Combined with tallies based on hospital sources and media reports since the beginning of the war and an in-depth review of available evidence by The Associated Press, the figures show that more than 110,600 Iraqis have died in violence since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion.
The number is a minimum count of violent deaths. The official who provided the data to the AP on condition of anonymity because of its sensitivity estimated the actual number of deaths at 10 percent to 20 percent higher because of thousands who are still missing and civilians who were buried in the chaos of war without official records.
On Thursday, those numbers rose with suicide blasts that killed 81 people.
The Health Ministry has tallied death certificates since 2005, and late that year the United Nations began using them — along with hospital and morgue figures — to publicly release casualty counts.
But by early 2007, when sectarian violence was putting political pressure on the U.S. and Iraqi governments, the Iraqi numbers disappeared.
The data obtained by the AP measure only violent deaths — people killed in attacks such as the shootings, bombings, mortar attacks and beheadings that have ravaged Iraq. It excluded indirect factors such as damage to infrastructure, health care and stress that caused thousands more to die.
The numbers show just how traumatic the war has been for Iraq.
In a nation of 29 million people, the deaths represent 0.38 percent of the population. Proportionally, that would be like the United States losing 1.2 million people to violence in the four-year period; about 17,000 people are murdered every year in the U.S.
Security has improved since the worst years, but almost every person in Iraq has been touched by the violence.
“We have lost everything,” said Badriya Abbas Jabbar, 54. A 2007 truck bombing targeting a market near her Baghdad home killed three granddaughters, a son and a niece.
North of the capital in the city of Baqubah, a mother shrouded in black calls to her three sons from her doorstep. She calls out as if they were alive, but they were killed in April 2007, when Shiite Muslim militiamen barged into their auto parts store and gunned them down because they were Sunni.
The death toll in Iraq has been a hotly disputed subject because of the high political stakes in a war opposed by many countries and by a large portion of the American public.
Critics on each side accuse the other of manipulating the death numbers to sway opinion.
While the Pentagon maintains meticulous records of the number of U.S. troops killed — at least 4,275 as of Thursday — it doesn’t publicly release comprehensive Iraqi casualty figures.
A controversial study conducted between May and July 2006 by Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and Al-Mustansiriya University in Baghdad estimated that 601,027 Iraqis had died due to violence.
