The BBC looks at the efforts of the Iraq Body Count, why they are doing so and the Iraq government reaction.

There is also an analysis of criticism of the IBC and a breakdown of areas of civilian deaths.

The report attempts to show that Western governments are at least partly wrong in their assertion that counting bodies is futile. Our data has been extracted from a comprehensive analysis of over 10,000 press and media reports… Our accounting is not complete: only an in-depth, on-the-ground census could come close to achieving that.

“Nearly two-and-a-half years on, neither the US or UK have begun to systematically measure the impact of their actions in terms of human lives destroyed,” Professor John Sloboda, one of the authors of the report, said.

“Our report has shown that what is lacking is not the capacity to do this work but the will.”

This comes on a day when the British government announced three UK soldiers are facing war crimes charges as well as criminal charges in connection with the death of a detainee in Iraq in September 2003.