KEY POINTS:
A New Zealand academic who has challenged a widely quoted estimate of the death toll in Iraq has been invited to go to Washington and advise the United States military on ways of predicting attacks.
Dr Sean Gourley, 27, a research fellow at Oxford University in Britain, created
a stir in scientific circles when he and a colleague dismissed a claim by other researchers that the American-led invasion of Iraq had led to the deaths of nearly 655,000 Iraqis.
That figure is at least 10 times higher than estimates from Iraq's Government and US authorities.
Dr Gourley and his colleague Professor Neil Johnson believe the figure is 218,000 Iraqi deaths.
This month, Dr Gourley will attend a Los Angeles conference, then visit military and State Department officials in Washington DC.
The meetings were arranged last month by an academic colleague who worked with Paul Bremer's US-run Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq.
Yesterday, Dr Gourley said the Americans were interested in computer simulations he had done on the timing and size of events.
Information from the statistical computer studies could be extrapolated to predict the size and location of attacks, but Dr Gourley likened their reliability for this purpose to making long-term earthquake predictions.
His work is based on many civil conflicts including those in Colombia, Northern Ireland, Afghanistan and Iraq.
Dr Gourley and Professor Johnson believe the patterns they have found can reliably indicate how many factions are involved in the Iraq conflict.
"In the first 180 days of the war there were 15 to 30 groups," Dr Gourley told Science magazine.
"After day 540, our model estimates there to be 100 to 130 different groups."
The knowledge of conflict they have gained from their work led Dr Gourley and Professor Johnson to criticise the Iraqi death toll estimate of a US-led study, published in British medical journal the Lancet last October.
They say the study, by researchers from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and Al Mustansiriya University in Baghdad, overestimated Iraqi deaths by a factor of three.
About 218,000 would be "closer to the truth," said Dr Gourley.
The Lancet study - attacked by President George W. Bush and others in his Administration - said between 392,979 and 942,636 Iraqi deaths had occurred because of the war, which began in March 2003.
The research was based on a survey of 1849 Iraqi households in 47 randomly selected clusters around the country, asking about death numbers in each of the homes before and after the war started.
These figures were multiplied to produce a number for the whole of Iraq.
Dr Gourley is a physicist who has been studying statistical patterns in financial markets and civil conflicts.
He said the flaw of the Lancet study was that it polled too many families who lived on main streets or their feeders, where bombings and shootings were more common than in back alleys.
Families living near main streets would have a higher death rate than those in more isolated areas, distorting the national estimate.
The authors of the Lancet study have defended their research methods, saying that they sampled deeper into residential areas than their written report suggested, and that areas other than obvious sites of violence had been included.
Dr Gourley, a Canterbury University graduate, won a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford.
He is in New Zealand for a Christmas visit to see his family.
IRAQ TOLL
* 218,000 - NZ scientist Dr Sean Gourley's estimate of the number of Iraqis killed since March 2003
* 655,000 - US-led study's estimate, published in the Lancet, a British medical journal
