Nearly 25,000 civilians have been killed in Iraq in violence linked to the US-led occupation over the last two years, according to a major new report published today.

The report, issued by Iraq Body Count in association with the Oxford Research Group, relies on press reports and mortuary officials to calculate that 24,865 civilians have died in airstrikes, bombings, shoot-outs and endemic criminal violence in Iraq since March 2003.

The report found that women and children account for almost 20 per cent of civilian deaths in Iraq and that the number of civilians killed in the second year of the US-led occupation is nearly twice the number killed in the first.

"On average, 34 ordinary Iraqis have met violent deaths every day since the invasion of March 2003. Our data show that no sector of Iraqi society has escaped," said Professor John Sloboda, one of the report's authors at its launch this morning.

Professor Sloboda, who is a professor of psychology at the University of Keele, said that he hoped the report would prompt the British and American governments to take more notice of the civilian cost of the ongoing violence.

"It remains a matter of the gravest concern that, nearly two and half years on, neither the US nor the UK governments have begun to systematically measure the impact of their actions in terms of human lives destroyed," he said.

The report found that a large proportion of the civilian casualties in Iraq occurred in the first months of the war. Around 30 per cent of all civilian deaths occurred before May 2003 in the heavy bombardments and massive airstrikes that accompanied the US-led invasion.

But the study also found that one of the main causes of violent deaths among Iraq's civilian population was the high prevalence of crime and banditry in the country.

Although coalition soldiers caused 37 per cent of civilian casualties, "post-invasion criminal violence" was seen as accounting for 36 per cent. By contrast, insurgent attacks have caused just 9 per cent of civilian deaths.

And in Iraq today, the current onslaught of violence continued as 13 people were killed in an ambush near the city of Baquba when insurgents attacked a minibus carrying workers to a US army base.

Gunmen in two cars blocked the bus on its way to the US camp at Baquba, a restless city 45 miles northeast of Baghdad, and opened fire, according to the Iraqi Interior Ministry.

Ten workers were killed in the gunfire and a further three people died when bus careered across the road and collided with another car. From early reports, it is unclear whether the car was carrying insurgents or civilians.

The bodies of the workers were taken to hospitals in Baquba and the nearby town of Khalis.

Iraqi civilians working at US military facilities are frequent targets for attacks by insurgents and Baquba is an unsettled city. Twelve Iraqi soldiers were killed in Baquba last week when gunmen overwhelmed their checkpoint in a well planned attack.

The ambush came as a further two people were killed when an Iraqi police patrol triggered a roadside bomb in the northern city of Kirkuk. One of the dead was a member of Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), the political party of Iraqi President Jalal Talabani.

President Talabani today promised that the current outbreak of violence in Iraq, which has killed nearly 200 civilians in the last week, would not delay the drafting of the country's constitution, which is due to be completed by August 15.

The President told reporters that the document, seen as a critical part of Iraq's progress to democracy, could be finished by the end of July.

"The committees working on the constitution are about to finalise the constitution and it could be ready by end of the current month," he said.

President Talabani said the only objections were being raised by the Sunni members of the 71-member drafting committee. "There are some issues raised by our Sunni Arab brothers about the constitution and we are discussing them and if we reach an agreement, I think the constitution could be ready by end of the current month," he added.

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