対イラク武力行使

For the collation of our statistics we visited the most remote villages, spoke and coordinated with grave-diggers across Iraq, obtained information from hospitals, and spoke to thousands of witnesses who saw incidents in which Iraqi civilians were killed by US fire," he said.

Detailed figures

Al-Ubaidi, a UK-based physiology professor, provided a detailed breakdown of the 37,000 civilian deaths for each governorate (excluding the Kurdish areas) relating to the period between March and October 2003:

Baghdad: 6103
Mosul: 2009
Basra: 6734
Nasiriya: 3581
Diwania: 1567
Wasit: 2494
Babil: 3552
Karbala and Najaf: 2263
Muthana: 659
Misan: 2741
Anbar: 2172
Kirkuk: 861
Salah al-Din: 1797.

The People's Kifah said the process of data gathering stopped after one of the group's workers was arrested by Kurdish militias and handed over to US forces in October 2003. The fate of the worker remains unclear.

Missing worker

"I am taking this opportunity of talking to Aljazeera.net to request that the US occupation authorities reveal the whereabouts of the worker, who was arrested and then went missing. We are afraid he is being tortured the way Abu Ghraib prisoners were tortured," al-Ubaidi said.

"His name is Ramzi Musa Ahmad. He is a 32-year-old Iraqi engineer who was on his way to the Iraqi Kurdish governorate al-Sulaimania last October to fax me the information to Britain, because telephone services had not been restored in Baghdad."

According to al-Ubaidi: "The minibus in which Ahmad was travelling was stopped at a Kurdish checkpoint. He was arrested and handed over to US army."