 HCR in Iraq. The second main reason is that literally people are running out of money because when you leave Iraq and you're a refugee by law you're legally not allowed to work in the country that you go to. So if you're not able to find a black market job or have someone there that can support you or are rich enough or have enough money put away to support yourself, when your money runs out what are you gonna do? So you go back home and that's why those are the two main reasons why these 30,000 people are going back. Less than 20% of those 30,000 people returning their homes are doing so because they want to. So just just a couple of analyses that I could give of take the information deemed spewed by the corporate media about what's actually happening on the ground and interesting things happen when you give context and when you give real facts about what's happening on the ground. But again a little bit more overall context just to update you on the situation on the ground. I want to talk about the number of people killed in Iraq but I want to start with a personal story to underscore why most of these deaths you never hear about you never will. I have a there's a man that I met in Bakuba. I talk about it in my book several times. His name is Sheikh Adnan. I met him when I was in there doing interviews at the very end of my first trip actually. So this is back in January 2004. And then we became friends and stayed in touch. He's a Friday speaker at his mosque, a very religious man and Islamic scholar at Baghdad University and had actually written a book a little book called Jesus and the Holy Quran because he thought it'd be a good idea to try to have something to offer US soldiers when they came into the country to show similarities between Islam and Christianity rather than the differences being harped on by the media. So this gives you an idea of the kind of God that Sheikh Adnan is. And I'd come to Baghdad and be working and he'd stop by my hotel after he'd gone to his classes at Baghdad University and or come in from Bakuba Strait just to bring me home cooked meals from his wife because he knew I was just eating like street kebabs all the time and just lovely guy. And then when it got too dangerous for me to keep going back into Iraq he started coming out to Syria or Jordan to visit me. And this past summer when I was over in Syria reporting on the refugee situation he came out to visit me again and we spent time and then I came home from the trip and he'd come out to visit me in Syria with a friend of his who also spoke good English. And a couple of months after I got home I heard from his friend I got an email and he said well what happened Sheikh Adnan had gone to visit his parents as he does every week and he was coming back home in his car and he had his 10 year old daughter with him and they were pulled over by a car full of gunmen and they were pulled over and they sent a little girl home and they said we're just going to take your father we have to ask him some questions and so they two of them got in the car with guns on them and they drove him away in his car and that's it and that's that's it and it's you know and basically when you look at the news coming out of Iraq every day and you see well the Iraqi police uncover 12 bodies in a field outside of a Cuba or scores of bodies walk up wash up on the beach of the Tigris River you know this he's one of those so they basically rarely if ever makes the media and no one will ever see or hear from or know what happened and that's the situation most of the deaths don't get reported in the media at all and so when we look at the overall situation with with that story in mind multiplied countless numbers of times that's why when we have something like the report that was published in the British peer reviewed medical journal of Lancet in October 2006 otherwise known as the Lancet report that found 655,000 Iraqis or 2.5% of the total population of the country had died as a direct result of the invasion and occupation that when that first came out that figure shocked a lot of people but people like me and other journalists who have spent enough time in Iraq to see the apocalyptic nature of the occupation and how violent and completely out of control it is it wasn't that shocking actually and especially when me and I don't know how many of my colleagues know so many Sheikh Adnan's that that type of thing has happened to so but is is incredibly high as that figure is we have updated figures we have a group in the U.S. called just foreign policy that has taken a figure but they base their figure primarily on the Lancet study and then extrapolated information from U.N. data media reports etc and they've come up with a new number and that number is significantly higher and one of the main reasons it's it's significantly higher is because the legwork for that study published in the Lancet it was published October 2006 which is already over a year out of date but another reason is because the legwork for that study took place in July 2005 so we basically have no new data on the number of dead from July 2005 until now in between July 2005 and now we've seen periods of some of the heaviest violence of the entire occupation and so just foreign policies figure is now over 1.1 million Iraqis have died there's a similar type of organization in the UK a polling group that did their study and their study is actually 1.2 million dead Iraqis and in the United States a country with a population now a bit over 300 million people I haven't done this in Canada so I can't give you something a little bit more tangible closer to home to really try to drive this home but in the United States if we were going to show comparable casualties of a similar percent of the same percentage of people that would have died in the United States it would mean that every person in Atlanta Denver Boston Seattle Milwaukee Fort Worth Baltimore San Francisco Dallas and Philadelphia would be dead every single person and when we consider the fact that Iraq's population when the when the invasion was launched in March 2003 was 27 million people it's now around 23 million people because as I said before there's according to the UNHCR there's a minimum of 2.25 million people internally displaced within Iraq refugees within their own country there's at least another two and a quarter million that have fled the country all together and these are very very conservative figures there's a minimum number of three million people that have been significantly wounded and according to an Oxfam international report published this last July four million Iraqis are in dire need of emergency aid for example seven percent of the country does not have access to potable water so the four million and these are not the refugees so the four million these are people that if they don't get water food and emergency medical attendants as they need it soon they're literally at risk for their lives so when we add all these numbers up and the number of dead that means that over 50 of the total population of Iraq are either displaced wounded in need of emergency assistance or dead but things are getting better in Iraq if you listen to the corporate media I want to read two things from the book one I'd like to read is about a short bit of from when I went into Fallujah during the April 2004 siege and again to give you a bit of a taste of what it really felt like to be in Iran particularly in the middle of the conflict zone and I decided to go into Fallujah because there were no reporters in the city aside from two correspondents with Al Jazeera and the military was doing everything they could to keep journalists outside of the country they had outside of the city they had coordinated off the best they could they were doing things like turning away aid convoys turning away media vehicles and in fact they were trying so hard even to get the Al Jazeera correspondents out that they set up this ruse that they were going to be doing negotiations on April 9th the siege started on April 4th and they were so troubled by the fact that Al Jazeera was airing footage of american sniper shooting civilians american snipers shooting ambulances warplanes bombing civilian homes etc this was not helping their image across the Arab world and so when the U.S. were trying to set up truce negotiations for April 9 with resistance fighters in the city one of their demands was that the Al Jazeera camera crew leave the city so on April 9th hearing about these atrocities I had the chance