How many Iraqis have been killed as a result of the country's 2003 invasion and its long-drawn-out and bloody aftermath? The truth is, no one knows: what we do know is that Iraq Body Count's huge public database of civilian deaths and the incidents in which they occurred (as of mid-2019, numbering over 200,000 killed and more than 50,000 incidents) is sufficiently well documented to be essentially undeniable. This is no ‘estimated’ number, but quite literally a painstaking and transparent count, with each database entry and its details open to public scrutiny.

There have been a handful of more or less rigorous efforts to estimate a ‘total’ number of Iraqi deaths, including a few that briefly captured the headlines despite their shortcomings but, as Lily Hamourtziadou reminds us, these provided only snapshots rather than the continuous monitoring and updating that a long war requires. The true number therefore remains unknown, not least because the nations that rushed to war on the flimsiest of pretexts remain incurious about, and have done very little to discover, the scale of its human toll.

There is another problem with only aiming for numbers. When it comes to recording people killed, the only appropriate question is who died, not merely how many (the latter is important too, but easily enough derived from the former). Each of those 200,000 people had a name; each was as individual as you or I; and it follows that each should be remembered as an individual whose life was violently ended, not as part of a statistic. The Iraq Body Count project records the names and demographic details of civilian victims whenever possible but despite our best efforts, less than 7% can yet be listed by name and little more than a third by age or gender. ‘Counting’ is therefore what we must do when we lack the means to properly record individual lives lost: we resort to it only to ensure that it is at least never forgotten that on this day, in that place, as a result of some specified form of armed violence, this many people were killed.