MORE than 100,000 civilians have died as a result of the allied invasion of Iraq in March last year, the first study of mortality in the country claims today.

The research, conducted in Iraq last month by a team of American and Iraqi researchers, will be published on the online edition of The Lancet, the medical journal.

It suggests that most civilian deaths have been due to military activity, with those caused by violence rising sharply in recent months.

The figures far exceed all previous estimates. Their publication just five days before the US presidential election are bound to cause controversy by reinforcing the impression that events are out of control.

The latest estimates by a group of British academics called Iraq Bodycount, which compiles figures from witness accounts and media reports, put the number of civilian deaths at between 14,160 and 16,289.

The British and American militaries keep records of casualties among their own troops, but neither attempts to count how many civilians have been killed. Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, has used an estimate of 10,000.

The Ministry of Defence was sceptical about the findings. “No figures that are produced are reliable at this stage,” a spokesman told The Times. “The Ministry of Health in Iraq has only started to collate casualty figures in the last six months.

“Our rules of engagement are very strict and we only use lethal force where absolutely necessary and do what we can to avoid civilian casualties.”

The report was compiled by a team led by Les Roberts, a public health expert from the Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore. They surveyed clusters of households in 33 regions of the country. They then compared civilian mortality rates before and after the invasion.

Statisticians who have analysed the data said last night that the scientists’ methodology was strong and the civilian death count could well be conservative. They said that the work effectively disproved suggestions by US authorities that civilian bodycounts were impossible to conduct.

In coming to a total of 100,000 civilian deaths, the team excluded Fallujah, where two thirds of the violent deaths recorded have occurred.

Experts said that including this area, where collecting data remains highly dangerous, would push the total number of civilian deaths much higher.

Dr Roberts told The Times last night that the death toll from bombing suggested a pressing need to alter air strike strategies.

“We can say with absolute confidence that both mortality and violent deaths have gone way up,” he said.

“Making conservative assumptions, we think that about 100,000 deaths or more have happened since the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

“Violence accounted for most of the excess deaths, and air strikes from coalition forces accounted for most violent deaths.”

Dr Roberts said that a striking finding was that violence had claimed such a high proportion of deaths, as opposed to disease and lack of medication.

“I was expecting the social destruction that goes along with war to be the main killer,” he said.

“In most conflicts it is those factors rather than violence that results in death, but Iraq was quite different. In Iraq the deaths were all due to violence.”

He said that the findings suggested that use of aerial weaponry in crowded urban areas was a not a precise way of targeting Iraqi insurgents.

Overall, the risk of death was found to be two and a half times greater after the invasion than before.

The risk was 1.5 times higher if mortality around the hotspot of Falluja was excluded. The lower figure equated to 98,000 deaths due to the conflict, the team said.

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