A British NGO, Iraq Body Count (IBC) has claimed that nearly 1.62 lakh people were killed in Iraq during the nine-year long US invasion.
Almost 80 percent of them were civilians while the remainders were US soldiers, Iraqi Security Forces, and insurgents.
The NGO warned that the level of violence has not changed much but the number of incidents have come down from the peak of sectarian strife in 2006 and 2007.
The NGO’s overall toll differed markedly from that published by the Iraqi government.
The government’s monthly data puts the death toll since the beginning of 2007 at 34,485.
