100 Names of Civilians Killed

— and only 2% of a vital task completed

John Sloboda

27th May 2003

Since the start of Iraq Body Count project we have been recording names of civilians killed. We have done this whenever names have been given in the media reports which form the sources for our work.

The table below contains the first 100 full names of civilians killed that we have been able to extract. They are listed in date order of death. Also included, where known, are age and/or brief personal details, the place of death, the date of death, the source in which the name was reported, and the incident code from the IBC data base. The majority of the basic research was undertaken by IBC archivist Kay Williams.

We record these names for exactly the same basic motivation as others have recorded the names of those who perished on September 11th 2001.1 Each person was a victim whose life was unjustly and abruptly ended. Each person loved and was loved: their death leaves an irreplaceable hole in someone’s heart. Each person requires to be remembered, not as a statistic but as a human being brutally plucked from their life, their family, their friends.

At the time of writing (May 27th) the maximum recorded civilians deaths arising as a result of coalition military action has exceeded 7,000. These 100 names therefore represent less than 2% of the total killed. Despite this, our list is, at present, the longest list of full names that has been published. We have found just over 200 further deaths for which some incomplete name information is available. This is generally of the form “relatives of (name)”, “11 members of the (name) family” or a more specific designation such as “daughter of (name)”. For the moment we are not publishing this data (in the hope that full names will become available) but are constantly adding to it and will make it available in due course.2 We also plan to add further human details to the data below, as we are able to extract and organise it.

On Friday 16th May 2003, the Guardian Newspaper devoted a special issue of their G2 supplement to obituaries of people killed in the Iraq War. Their publication was headed “One hundred lives: the untold stories of the men, women and children who died during the war on Iraq”. An abridged version is available on the Guardian website.3The Guardian report provided a brief obituary of each person killed, written by one of 7 Guardian journalists, James Meek, Will Hodgkinson, Ewan MacAskill, Jonathan Steele, Simon Hattenstone, Oliver Burkeman, and Luke Harding.

Only 47 of the deaths listed by the Guardian were civilian. The remainder were soldiers, mainly American. A more comprehensive list of names of coalition military personnel killed has been compiled by CNN.4

Compiling the fullest possible memorial to the civilian victims of the Iraq War is clearly a moral and humanitarian imperative. We publish these hundred civilian names partly to raise awareness of the fact that names are available, and the search for more names must be intensified. The fact that we have so few names should not be taken as any particular comment on the work of the journalists who published these names. It is not the job of journalists to gather names in a systematic way — their job is to report what they see and who they talk to. The preponderance of names from incidents in Baghdad reflects the high concentration of journalists working in that city, who were able to talk to doctors, relatives, and eye-witnesses. The full job of compiling a register of the dead can only be done by properly funded organisations operating on the ground in Iraq with that express purpose.

Our contribution to this work is clearly limited, and we cannot be confident that this work will progress much more rapidly or easily for people on the ground. One major problem is, of course, than many of those killed were not able to be identified at the time of their deaths. There are heart-rending reports of Iraqi families going from hospital to hospital and seeking out every makeshift graveyard they could find, looking for loved ones and their “missing, presumed dead.” The Iraqi Red Crescent, one of the agencies attempting a comprehensive count, was reported recently as saying that it was still too early for anything like a definitive estimate of civilian casualties.5

A comprehensive census of civilian deaths may take months or even years, and may perhaps never be so complete that each and every individual is named and registered among the war’s victims. But this makes it all the more important that every available name is recorded, so we know the extent of the task that lies ahead.

This table is copyright © iraqbodycount.org. Permission to reproduce should be sought from