Wikileaks Iraq: data journalism maps every death

Data journalism allows us to really interrogate the Wikileaks Iraq war logs release. Here is the statistical breakdown

Simon Rogers

guardian.co.uk

Saturday 23 October 2010

Wikileaks Iraq: a man holds his wounded daughter outside in August 2006 after being injured in road side bomb explosion. Photograph: Ali Abbas/EPA

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 arean. 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

Download the data

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 play 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.

Get the fullscreen version

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 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

Deaths and wounded

YEAR	Coalition forces	Iraqi forces	Civilians	Enemy	TOTAL DEATHS	TOTAL WOUNDED, all categories
2004	747	1,031	2,781	5,995	10,554	18,567
2005	856	2,256	5,746	3,594	12,452	24,850
2006	821	4,370	25,178	4,657	35,026	41,164
2007	919	4,718	23,333	6,793	35,763	55,804
2008	282	1,948	6,362	2,635	11,227	23,632
2009	146	873	2,681	310	4,010	12,365
TOTAL	3,771	15,196	66,081	23,984	109,032	176,382

Causes of death

Category	Coalition forces	Iraqi forces	Civilians	Insurgents
Accident	428	256	599	22
Ambush	4	93	85	154
Arrest	0	12	20	56
Arson	0	6	114	6
ARTY	0	0	2	41
Assassination	0	183	246	7
Attack	86	1,167	1,627	3,775
Attack Threat	0	0	1	1
Blue-Blue	9	2	3	4
Blue-Green	0	51	4	0
Blue-White	0	0	62	1
Border Ops	0	0	0	2
Breaching	0	0	1	0
Cache Found/Cleared	2	10	28	236
Carjacking	0	5	27	5
Close Air Support	0	0	5	776
Confiscation	0	0	3	57
Cordon/Search	2	43	47	316
Counter Mortar Fire	0	0	0	24
Deliberate Attack	0	3	0	119
Demonstration	1	16	476	2
Detain	0	2	19	87
Direct Fire	482	4,270	4,766	6,807
Direct Fire Threat	0	0	1	0
Elicitation	0	1	0	0
Equipment Failure	4	2	3	0
Escalation of Force	0	22	686	70
Explosive Remnants of War (ERW)/Turn In	0	0	1	0
Green-Blue	5	14	3	0
Green-Green	0	58	17	2
Green-White	0	2	48	0
IED Explosion	2,107	5,990	20,228	3,455
IED False	0	0	3	0
IED Found/Cleared	6	31	90	579
IED Hoax	1	0	2	1
IED Pre-detonation	0	0	3	50
IED Suspected	0	0	0	37
IED Threat	0	0	0	2
Indirect Fire	192	284	2,087	1,040
Indirect Fire Threat	0	0	0	2
Intimidation Threat	0	6	18	1
Kidnapping	0	67	161	18
Kidnapping Threat	0	0	2	0
Looting	0	0	18	3
Medevac	3	1	5	2
Mine Found/Cleared	0	0	2	1
Mine Strike	37	24	30	6
Movement to Contact	1	0	0	77
Murder	9	2,169	32,563	73
Murder Threat	0	0	1	0
Other	194	72	584	437
Other Defensive	2	5	141	116
Other offensive	0	4	18	639
Patrol	0	3	43	61
Police Actions	0	1	14	32
Raid	12	75	86	619
Recon	0	0	0	13
Sabotage	0	2	6	0
SAFIRE	67	4	22	317
SAFIRE Threat	0	0	1	0
Search and Attack	0	0	0	90
Shooting	0	1	8	0
Small Unit Actions	27	13	65	3,129
Smuggling	0	1	5	2
Sniper Ops	86	173	62	364
Staff Estimate	0	2	380	0
Surveillance	0	1	8	61
TCP	0	0	5	25
Theft	0	8	57	14
Tribal Feud	0	14	138	5
UAV	0	0	3	49
Unexploded Ordnance	0	2	15	3
Unknown Explosion	4	24	284	61
Vehicle Interdiction	0	0	4	29
White-Blue	0	0	5	0
White-Green	0	0	0	1
White-White	0	0	20	0
Not known	0	1	0	0
TOTAL	3,771	15,196	66,081	23,984