LONDON, July 20, 2005 (IslamOnline.net) – The US-led occupation forces in Iraq have caused 37 percent of civilian deaths – some 25,000 in two years -- in the war-torn country, according to a survey by a US-British non-government group.

The survey by the Iraq Body Count (IBC) found that US-led occupation forces were chiefly responsible for the huge numbers of dead civilians, with criminals and gangs a close second at 36 percent, while resistance fighters accounted for 9.5 percent, Reuters reported.

The IBC’s survey said that US air strikes caused most (64%) of all deaths categorized under the explosives section.

“The ever-mounting Iraqi death toll is the forgotten cost of the decision to go to war in Iraq. On average, 34 ordinary Iraqis have met violent deaths every day since the invasion of March 2003. Our data show that no sector of Iraqi society has escaped,” Professor John Sloboda, one of the report’s authors, said on the group’s Web site.

The survey, dubbed “A Dossier on Civilian Casualties in Iraq, 2003-2005,” said that almost a third of civilian deaths occurred during the invasion itself, from March 20 to May 1, 2003, when US-led forces carried out their “shock and awe” bombing campaign on Baghdad.

In the first year two years after the invasion-turned-occupation, 24,865 civilians were reported killed with women and children representing almost 20% of deaths.

“Children were disproportionately affected by all explosive devices but most severely by air strikes and unexploded ordnance including cluster bomblets,” according to the survey.

The UN Development Program (UNDP) has said that Iraqi children are paying the silent cost of the US-led occupation with malnutrition rates exceeding by far those in the world’s poorest and disease-plagued countries.

The United Nations children's relief agency (UNICEF) has further said that as many as half a million traumatized Iraqi children will need psychological help as a result of the US-led war.

Children are sometimes the victims of the grisly random attacks in the country. At least 24 children were killed on July 13, when a suicide bomber blew himself up near a US foot patrol.

Earlier this week, a fuel truck bomb killed 98 civilians south of Baghdad, in one of the bloodiest indiscriminate attacks since March 2003.

The survey said that children were disproportionately affected by all explosive devices but most severely by air strikes. (Reuters)

On the injuries toll, it said that at least 42,500 civilians were wounded, noting that the invasion phase caused 41% of all reported injuries.

It also found that the highest wounded-to-death ratio incidents occurred during the invasion phase.

There are no official estimates of the number of amputees in Iraq after the US-led invasion in March 2003, but doctors put the number at thousands, while experts maintain that the cases outnumber those in countries like Afghanistan, Cambodia and Angola.

The IBC’s survey is the first detailed account of all non-combatants reported killed or wounded during the first two years of the continuing conflict.

It is based on analysis of more than 10,000 press and media reports. Mortuary officials and medics were the most frequently cited witnesses.