The survey was sponsored by the Center for International Emergency Disaster and Refugee Studies, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, MD, United States (authors L Roberts PhD, G Burnham MD) and the Department of Community Medicine, College of Medicine, Al-Mustansiriya University, Baghdad, Iraq. Roberts' team was chosen for their experience in estimating total mortality in war zones, for example his estimate of 1.7 million deaths due to the war in the Congo[8] which not only met with widespread acceptance and no challenge when published in 2000,[9] but resulted and was cited in a U.N. Security Council resolution that all foreign armies must leave Congo, a United Nations request for $140 million in aid, and the US State Department pledging an additional $10 million in aid. Similar studies have been accepted uncritically as estimates of wartime mortality in Darfur[10] and Bosnia.