Author(s)

K. H. Tiedemann

Abstract

War and civil conflict are major causes of deaths and injuries among civilian populations in many countries. While the main focus to date in analysis of the Iraq insurgency has been on deaths among the Coalition, Iraqi and insurgent forces, the conflict has had a major toll on the civilian population of Iraq. This study attempts to partially redress this imbalance by examining the impact of the insurgency on civilians. The study uses time-series analysis to model the impact of coalition and insurgent troop levels on three main indicators of civilian well being: the number of violent incidents per month, the frequency of externallycaused civilian death, and the number of bombing-related civilian injuries in Iraq, for the period May 2003 to October 2005. Keywords: civilian deaths, civilian injuries, war related risks, regression models, two-stage least squares. 1 Introduction War and civil conflict are major causes of death and injury among civilian populations in a number of countries. Although a large descriptive and analytical literature has examined the causes, nature and impact of war and civil conflict, there have been relatively few attempts to quantitatively model the impacts of troop levels on risks to civilian populations. Such information can potentially assist in the development of strategies to minimize the impact of war and civil conflict on civilians. This study uses time-series analysis to model the impact of Coalition and insurgent troop levels in Iraq on three main indicators of civilian well being: the number of violent incidents per month, the frequency of externally-caused

Keywords

civilian deaths, civilian injuries, war related risks, regression models, two-stage least squares.