The U.S. media's fixation on the number of American casualties in Iraq and the recent downward trend in those figures tends to obscure the far greater number of Iraqi civilians who have died in this war. There are no published official counts of Iraqi deaths caused by the American-led invasion and the violence that has continued since then, only estimates. But a new scientific survey of the Iraqi civilian death toll from March 2003 to June 2006 puts it at 151,000.

Given the relative populations of the two countries, that would be the equivalent of roughly 1,700,000 American deaths. And yet the Iraqi death toll receives only scant mention in the American news media, and for that matter most foreign media as well. Why is there such disregard for the enormous price being paid by the population?

In the early days of the invasion, General Tommy Franks famously told reporters at his headquarters in Qatar, “We don't do body counts.” The Pentagon and America's allies have stuck to that position ever since. They have never given an accounting, or even a rough estimate, of Iraqi civilians who died in the bombing and crossfire during the invasion and the insurgency and civil war that still wrack the country.

Under the Geneva Conventions and the Hague Regulations, the United States and its allies have a responsibility as occupying authorities to prevent civilian deaths, including those resulting from the breakdown of law and order and inadequate health care and sanitation. So you might think a little accounting would be in order.

The Iraqis themselves do not have complete figures, because there is no reliable death registration system in their country. The provisional government once made an attempt to count the number of bodies arriving in hospitals. That figure of 3,853 civilians killed between April and November 2004 was necessarily incomplete, since many of those who are killed or die never reach a hospital.

It has been left up to anti-war campaigners and other organizations to provide their own estimates. A web site, iraqbodycount.org, keeps a running count of “non-combatants killed by military or paramilitary action and the breakdown in civil security following the invasion.” That estimate of more than 80,000 deaths to date is also incomplete since it relies primarily on media reports and other published sources rather than a scientific survey.

The most comprehensive scientific effort to arrive at a realistic figure is the report I cited earlier. Based on an Iraqi government survey that was supervised by the World Health Organization and published in the New England Journal of Medicine, it estimates a range of violent deaths (between March 2003 and June 2006) between 104,000 and 223,000, with 151,000 as the central estimate. That is a devastating total by any count.

American attempts to tamp down the Iraqi insurgency and end the civil war seem to have decreased the number of Iraqi civilian deaths since June 2006, but the improvement may not last. The American military has been arming Iraqi Sunni militiamen to help defeat the threat from Al Qaeda in Iraq, but there is no guarantee that these newly recruited forces will not eventually turn on each other. If that happens, Iraqi civilians will be caught in the crossfire. As always, they will suffer the most.