World War I casualties
Casualty statistics for World War I vary to a great extent; estimates of total deaths range from 9 million to over 15 million. Military casualties reported in official sources list deaths due to all causes, including an estimated 7 to 8 million combat related deaths (killed or died of wounds) and another two to three million military deaths caused by accidents, disease and deaths while prisoners of war. Official government reports listing casualty statistics were published by the United States and Great Britain. These secondary sources published during the 1920s, are the source of the statistics in reference works listing casualties in World War I. This article summarizes the casualty statistics published in the official government reports of the United States and Great Britain as well as France, Italy, Belgium, Germany, Austria and Russia. More recently the research of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) has revised the military casualty statistics of the UK and its allies; they include in their listing of military war dead personnel outside of combat theaters and civilians recruited from Africa, the Middle East and China who provided logistical and service support in combat theaters. The casualties of these support personnel recruited outside of Europe were previously not included with British war dead, however the casualties of the Labour Corps recruited from the British Isles were included in the rolls of British war dead published in 1921. The methodology used by each nation to record and classify casualties was not uniform, a general caveat regarding casualty figures is that they cannot be considered comparable in all cases.
Ottoman casualties of World War I
Among the 5 million, 771,844 were military casualties killed in action and other causes. The military only covers 15% of the total casualties. The main question is what happened to 85% (spread over all millets) of the casualties, which is more but not less than 4,000,000. Ottoman statistics analyzed by Turkish Kamer Kasim (Manchester University, Ph.D.), claims that cumulative percentage was 26.9% (higher than 25% reported by western sources) of the population, which this size stands out among the countries that took part in World War I. To understand the size of the issue, Kamer Kasım's %1.9 increase on the totals adds 399,000 civilians to the total number, which has not been reported in western sources.