British jihadi Sally Jones, a.k.a. the White Widow, and The Lancet's Iraqi casualty figures

By Péter MARTON

Times journalist Dipesh Gadher recounts Twitter-based conversations with Sally Jones, a British convert (and mother of two) who joined ISIS and was killed in a drone strike in June in the environs of Raqqa, in Syria, as reported last week (see photo).

Sally Jones' influences included punk rock, modelling, and drugs, followed by the strong sentiment of being pissed off about politics in that predictably US-foreign-policy-centric, pseudo-intellectual sense of the term, subsequently encountering Islam, and beginning to radicalise, heeding the call of ISIS recruiters.

I will react to one statement attributed by Gadher to Jones in the article referred above.

“I can’t help but be militant when all they do is kill us for being Muslim :( . . . You know they killed 1,220,550 innocent Muslims in the illegal Iraq war . . . the US and UK government it’s that wot did it for me. It’s them that’s the terrorists, not us.”

As noted by Gadher too, that figure of 1,220,550 killed is exaggerated almost by an order of magnitude, not to mention the slight problems with the wording that these people were "killed for being Muslim," and the suggestion that they were all killed by the US-led coalition. Given, for example, the high death toll of suicide bombings and assassinations.

Yet it is not altogether beyond understanding that jihadis are talking about such numbers now (and have been, before). This is not simply propaganda on their part. They take such numbers from scholarly sources. Western scholarly sources.

To explain...

Once upon a time, in the lawless lands of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, there was a round of fighting between a number of armed factions (including armies of intervening states) that was so bad compared to the fighting before it, and the fighting after it, that it was singled out to be called "Africa's world war" by some. This was the period from 1998 to 2003.

Humanitarian organisations and in general people concerned tried to draw attention to the toll of this conflict on the civilian population. Because the world public needs numbers to be able to think of a bad situation as a really bad situation, a second-best solution was employed.

Nobody was in a position to go around the DRC and count the dead, one by one, so a sample of households was chosen and surveyed, and a projection was made based on the reported number of deaths. The world thus learned that several million people may have died in the conflict.

The problem is that this was always a second-best solution only. For all we know, the numbers from the Congo may be overestimated or underestimated, depending on the implications of possible non-representativity resulting from sampling errors (those errors in turn resulting from basic sampling uncertainties that were as certainly having an impact as I'm typing this right now).

External actors were happy to have some numbers at last. For want of a better alternative, nobody criticised the survey methodology too seriously.

When some of the same people who were involved in the Congo survey (with Les Roberts at the lead) transported this methodology to Iraq, and published two studies in the medical journal The Lancet (a really prestigious medical journal but one with an often surprisingly political agenda), a large number of commentators forgot about this approach not being a very good approach in the first place.

But that is -- by far -- not all there is to this.

The survey method was always to be highly problematic in a politicised context. It could be safely known beforehand that the larger the numbers the worse it would be for the Bush administration eventually... And then "eight Iraqi physicians organized through Mustansiriya University in Baghdad" and carried out most of the work on the ground visiting "1,849 randomly selected households that had an average of seven members each."

Like, what could have gone wrong with this approach in the Iraq of 2003-2006?

The second Lancet study in 2006 confidently concluded nonetheless:

"We estimate that between March 18, 2003, and June, 2006, an additional 654,965 (392,979–942,636) Iraqis have died above what would have been expected on the basis of the pre-invasion crude mortality rate as a consequence of the coalition invasion. Of these deaths, we estimate that 601,027 (426,369–793,663) were due to violence." (Burnham, Roberts et al., 2006)

The Iraq Body Count project, a media-based casualty-counting collaborative that was no friend of the Iraqi intervention, quickly pointed out the commonsensical arguments as to why the above numbers cannot be taken seriously (IBC counted between 43,546 and 48,343 deaths at the time, by October 2006). For example, they pointed out that the numbers in the Lancet study imply

"bizarre and self-destructive behaviour on the part of all but a small minority of 800,000 injured, mostly non-combatant, Iraqis (only a tenth of whom showed up for hospital treatment according to available statistics)."

The Lancet study's numbers would also imply that

"On average, a thousand Iraqis have been violently killed every single day in the first half of 2006, with less than a tenth of them being noticed by any public surveillance mechanisms"

Which would then also raise the question of how surveying was technically possible for Roberts' team in a country with such lethality and so little ability to track all the people falling?

Long story short, the numbers in Burnham, Roberts et al. seem to be major overestimations.

It is true that news reports may fail to pick up all incidents involving casualties of any sort. But the Lancet study took scepticism of media-based counting methods to an irrational level. They could do so credibly for many because... who is to argue there weren't many tragic deaths in post-2003 Iraq?