Editors’ Note: While data itself is rarely a source of controversy, dataists.com supports pursuing a data-centric view of conflict. Here, Mike Dewar examines the Wikileaks Iraq war documents with sobering results. Hackers should note the link to his source code and methods at the end of the post.

…any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” — John Donne, Meditation XVII

The Iraq War logs recently released by Wikileaks are contained in a 371729121 byte CSV file. It contains 390849 rows and 34 columns. The columns contain dates, locations, reports, category information and counts of the killed and wounded. The date range of the events spans from 2004-11-06 12:37:00 to 2009-04-23 12:30:00, and the events are located within the bounding box defined by (22.5,22.4), (49.6,51.8). Row 4 describes a female walking into a crowd and detonating the explosives and ball bearings she was wrapped in, killing 35 and wounding 36. Searching for events mentioning `ball bearing’ returns 503 events.

There were 65349 Improvised Explosive Device (IED) explosions between the start of 2004 and the end of 2009. Of these 1794 had one enemy killed in action. The month that saw the highest number of explosions was May of 2007, when Iraq experienced 2080 IED explosions. During this month 693 civilians were killed, 85 enemies were killed and 93 friendlies were killed. The ratio of civilian deaths to combatant deaths is 3.89 civilians per combatant. On the first day of May there were 49 IED explosions in which 3 people were killed.

108 different categories are used to categorise all but 6 events. The category with the most events is `IED explosion’ with 65439 events, followed by `direct fire’ with 57815 events. The category `recon threat’ has 1 event which occurred at 8am on the 17th of April, 2009, where 25 people were noticed with 6 cars in front of a police station in Basra. There are 325 `rock throwing’ events and 325 `assassination’ events.

There are 1211 mentions of the word `robot’, 4710 mentions of the word `UAV’, 1332 mentions of the word `predator’ and 443 mentions of the word `reaper’. The first appearance of one of these keywords is on the 3rd of October, 2006. There are 445 mentions of one or more of the words “contractor”, “blackwater” or “triple canopy”.

The joint forces report that 108398 people lost their lives in Iraq during 2004-2010. 65650 civilians were killed, 15125 members of the host nation forces were killed, 23857 enemy combatants were killed, and 3766 friendly combatants were killed.

Please don’t believe any of this. Go instead to the data and have a look for yourself. All the code that has generated this post is available on github at http://github.com/mikedewar/Iraq-War-Diary-Analysis. You can also see what others have been saying, for example the Guardian and the New York Times have great write ups.