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BAGHDAD, MAR 10 (AP): Three years into the war, one grim measure of its impact on Iraqis can be seen at Baghdad's morgue: There, the staff has photographed and catalogued more than 24,000 bodies from the Baghdad area alone since 2003, almost all killed in violence.
Despite such snapshots, the overall number of Iraqi civilians and soldiers killed since the U.S.-led invasion in spring 2003 remains murky. Bloodshed has worsened each year, pushing the Iraqi death
toll into the tens of thousands. But no one knows the exact toll.
US President George W. Bush has said he thinks violence claimed at least 30,000 Iraqi dead as of December, while some researchers have cited numbers of 50,000, 75,000 or beyond.
The Pentagon has carefully counted the number of American military dead - now more than 2,300 - but declines to release its tally of Iraqi civilian or insurgent deaths.
The Iraqi Health Ministry estimates 1,093 civilians died in the first two months of this year, nearly a quarter of the deaths government ministries reported in all of 2005.
The Iraqi government, however, has swung wildly in its casualty estimates, leading many to view its figures with skepticism.
At the Baghdad morgue, more than 10,000 corpses were delivered in 2005, up from more than 8,000 in 2004 and about 6,000 in 2003, said the morgue's director Dr. Faik Baker. All were corpses from either suspicious deaths or violent or war-related deaths -- things like car bombs and gunshot wounds, tribal reprisals or crime - and not from natural causes.
By contrast, the morgue recorded under 3,000 violent or suspicious deaths in 2002, before the war, Baker said. The tally at the Baghdad morgue alone - one of several mortuaries in Iraq - thus
exceeds figures from Iraqi government ministries that say 7,429 Iraqis were killed across all of Iraq in 2005.
Baghdad, which has a fifth of Iraq's 25 million inhabitants, has been a main center of the violence, with insurgent attacks and sectarian tensions both high here.
Iraq Body Count, a British anti-war group, put its tally of war dead at between 28,864 and 32,506 as of Feb. 26, but that doesn't include Iraqi soldiers or insurgents. It compiles its estimate of
civilian deaths from news stories, corroborating each death through at least two reports.
But if Iraqi officials standardize tallies days later, news organizations have moved on to reporting other violence and may be unaware that early figures have been adjusted.
A United Nations survey conducted almost two years ago - before the deadliest guerrilla warfare began - said 24,000 Iraqi civilians and troops had been killed from the war's beginning in March 2003
through May 2004.
In late 2004, a study published in the Lancet medical journal estimated the war had caused some 98,000 civilian deaths. But the British government and others were skeptical of that finding, which was based on extrapolations from a small sample.
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