BAGHDAD, Iraq - A team of U.S. and Iraqi public health researchers has estimated that more than 600,000 civilians have died in violence across Iraq since the 2003 U.S. invasion, the highest estimate ever for the toll of the war here.

The figure breaks down to about 15,000 violent deaths a month, a number that is quadruple the one for July given by Iraqi government hospitals and the morgue in Baghdad and published last month in a U.N. report in Iraq. That month was the highest for Iraqi civilian deaths since the U.S. invasion.

But it is an estimate and not a precise count, and researchers acknowledged a margin of error that ranged from 426,369 to 793,663 deaths.

It is the second study by researchers from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. It uses samples of casualties from Iraqi households to extrapolate an overall figure of 601,027 Iraqis dead from violence between March 2003 and July 2006.

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