UPDATE: an academic who has worked with the data has pointed out some of its limitations - you can read his take here
Data journalism works best when there's a lot of data to work with. Wikileaks' Iraq war logs release has dumped some 391,000 records of the Iraq war into the public arena. We've had them for a few weeks - what have we found out?
This is in a different league to the Wikileaks Afghanistan leak - there's a good case for saying the new release has made the war the most documented in history. Every minor detail is now there for us to analyse and breakdown but one factor stands out: the sheer volume of deaths, most of which are civilians.
Some key findings:
Total deaths
• The database records 109,032 deaths in total for the period
• The database records the following death counts: 66,081 civilians, 23,984 insurgents and 15,196 Iraqi security forces
• The worst place for deaths was Baghdad - 45,497, followed by MND north (which is the region that goes from Baghdad up to Kurdistan) where another 34,210 died. The quietest place was the north east with only 328 deaths
Murders and escalation of force
• 34,814 people were recorded as murdered in 24,840 incidents
• The worst month was December 2006 with 2,566 murders - and 2006 was the worst year with 16,870 murders
• The database records 12,578 escalation of force incidents (where someone is shot driving too fast at a checkpoint, for instance) - and these resulted in 778 recorded deaths
Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs)
• There were 65,439 IED explosions over the period - with 31,780 deaths recorded on the database from those alone.
• There were another 44,620 IEDs found and cleared
• The worst month for IED explosions was May 2007 with 2,080 IED explosions
The Guardian has decided not to republish the entire database, largely because we can't be sure the summary field doesn't contain confidential details of informants and so on. But, so you have some data to work with, we have provided this spreadsheet. It contains the records of every incident where someone dies, nearly 60,000 in all. We have removed the summary field so it's just the basic data: the military heading, numbers of deaths and the geographic breakdown.
Google Fusion tables is fantastic for mapping out bulky datasets and they don't come much bulkier than this. We took all these incidents where someone had died and put it on the map above. The fullscreen version (see top of page) is easier to use. A few of the datapoints aren't mapping correctly - but this may be a problem with the data.
You can download it below, plus we've broken down the deaths by cause and year in sortable tables. What can you do with it?
Data summary
Download the data
• DATA: download details of every death in Iraq (Google Fusion tables, requires Google login)
• DATA: download the full sheet (no login)
• DATA: download our analysis spreadsheet
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