Iraq Body Count (IBC) was breaking new ground in 2003 when two academics, John Sloboda and Hamit Dardagan, decided to gather information from press articles about violent deaths as a result of the military intervention in Iraq – since no one else seemed to care about Iraqi civilians killed in the war. They presented their findings on a website under the name ”Iraq Body Count”, using the power of the internet long before the term ”open data” became a trending term. The data gathering still continues to this day and their numbers are, more than a decade later, often being referenced to as one of the few reliable sources regarding civilian deaths due to the war in Iraq (also read my interview with John Sloboda about IBC)

IBC:s database as of 31 January 2016 includes 160,577 – 179,534 documented civilian deaths, of which 12,275 individuals are named.