Many experts and expert groups from a range of fields are attempting to combine their knowledge to understand the lethality to Iraqis of the invasion and post-invasion violence in Iraq.
This is a slightly abridged and amended version of an invited "meta-analysis" of IBC's potential contribution to that understanding, presented in a closed meeting of the Ad Hoc Expert Group on mortality estimates for Iraq, convened by WHO in Geneva, May 2007.
3. Detail available from media reports
- Some variables (details within reports, such as the location or date) are so consistently reported that almost every IBC data-entry contains information about them.
- This means that any biases in the database regarding these highly-reported variables can only be contributed by unreported incidents.
1 IBC's Methods page listing these variables.
The detailed data collected by IBC, on up to 18 variables for each incident,1 varies from details that are present in almost every report, to those that are only sporadically reported. In the case of variables which are highly-reported, any biases must be due to those incidents which were entirely unreported, rather than reporting choices within the incidents that were covered.