How Many Iraqi Soldiers Died?

One of the shadows dimming the exuberant mood of the victory parades is the thought of the masses of Iraqi soldiers killed. In one of the most lopsided battles in history, 389 Americans were killed and 357 were wounded; other allied forces suffered 77 dead and 830 wounded. But how many Iraqis died? No one really knows or probably ever will.

In response to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group, the Defense Intelligence Agency last week released an internal estimate of 100,000 Iraqi soldiers killed, 300,000 wounded. But DIA said those figures had an "error factor of 50% or higher" -- to a statistician, a grotesque number. The Pentagon has little wish to refine its figures either. It has strained to avoid both the derision aroused by the body counts announced during the Vietnam War and anything that might sound like a callous boast. Some other assessments indicate the U.S. figures may be too high. Postwar visitors to Iraq have not seen enough injured veterans to justify a wounded-in-action figure anywhere near 300,000. British officials estimate Iraqi losses of 30,000 dead, 100,000 wounded -- a bare third of the Pentagon's count.

All these numbers are based on a series of extrapolations. First, calculate the approximate number of enemy troops on hand at the beginning of the war. Then, subtract the number of prisoners and the estimated total of deserters. Finally, apply to the remaining force standard ratios: of each 10 soldiers engaged, say, so-and-so many can be counted as killed, so-and-so many wounded.

The starting figures are derived from several sources: satellite and aerial- reconnaissance photos, interrogation of prisoners of war, reports from spies and special forces operating behind enemy lines, historical ratios of what percentages of forces engaged have been killed or wounded in past battles. Actual counts of corpses in the gulf war were uncommon. Most dead Iraqis were buried hastily by their comrades before the ground war or by Saudi soldiers after it, with little or no tally.

The gulf war was fought largely by air attacks against ground forces. Allied officers have tried to calculate the casualties from the numbers of tanks, other vehicles and artillery pieces destroyed. But aerial photography cannot disclose, for example, how many men a wrecked armored personnel carrier might have carried, let alone how many were killed or wounded or escaped unharmed.

Also, the U.S. figure of 540,000 enemy soldiers in Kuwait and southern Iraq when the war began seems much too high. It was based on satellite photos from which allied commanders counted the number of divisions deployed. But later interviews with prisoners indicated that many of the units were well below their official strength. Prisoner interrogations also hinted that desertions were even higher than the 150,000 the Pentagon estimated. Allied troops at the start of the ground war found the Iraqi defenses surprisingly thinly manned. So there may not have been enough Iraqis on hand to suffer 400,000 casualties, even if every last one was killed or wounded.