This week Truthdig celebrates the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Al Mustansiriya University in Baghdad and the Center for International Studies at MIT as well as The Lancet for their commitment to documenting the real number of Iraqi deaths that have resulted from the 2003 U.S. military invasion of Iraq.

The study, which was reviewed by four independent experts, estimates that over 655,000 Iraqis have been killed since the start of the war. According to the Christian Science Monitor, “One of the reviewing experts noted the ‘powerful strength’ of the research methods, ‘which involved house-to-house surveys by teams of doctors across Iraq.’ “