BAGHDAD, Iraq - At least 3,240 civilians died across Iraq (news - web sites) during a month of war, including 1,896 in Baghdad, according to a five-week Associated Press investigation.
The count is still fragmentary, and the complete toll ? if it is ever tallied ? is sure to be significantly higher.
Several surveys have looked at civilian casualties within Baghdad, but the AP tally is the first attempt to gauge the scale of such deaths from one end of the country to the other, from Mosul in the north to Basra in the south.
The AP count was based on records from 60 of Iraq's 124 hospitals ? including almost all of the large ones ? and covers the period between March 20, when the war began, and April 20, when fighting was dying down and coalition forces announced they would soon declare major combat over. AP journalists traveled to all of these hospitals, studying their logs, examining death certificates where available and interviewing officials about what they witnessed.
Many of the other 64 hospitals are in small towns and were not visited because they are in dangerous or inaccessible areas. Some hospitals that were visited had incomplete or war-damaged casualty records.
Even if hospital records were complete, they would not tell the full story. Many of the dead were never taken to hospitals, either buried quickly by their families in accordance with Islamic custom, or lost under rubble.
The AP excluded all counts done by hospitals whose written records did not distinguish between civilian and military dead, which means hundreds, possibly thousands, of victims in Iraq's largest cities and most intense battles aren't reflected in the total.
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