Editing Iraq Body Count project (section)

===English-language versus Arabic-language media sources===
The IBC report for March 2003 to March 2005<ref name="2003-5">Iraq Body Count. {{cite web|url= http://reports.iraqbodycount.org/a_dossier_of_civilian_casualties_2003-2005.pdf |title=A dossier of civilian casualties 2003-2005 }}&nbsp;{{small|(650&nbsp;[[Kibibyte|KiB]])}}. Report covers from 20 March 2003 to 19 March 2005, based on data available by 14 June 2005.</ref> states: "We have not made use of Arabic or other non-English language sources, except where these have been published in English. The reasons are pragmatic. We consider fluency in the language of the published report to be a key requirement for accurate analysis, and English is the only language in which all team members are fluent. It is possible that our count has excluded some victims as a result."

[[Stephen Soldz]], who runs the website "Iraq Occupation and Resistance Report", writes in a 5 February 2006 ''ZNet'' article<ref name="soldz">Stephen Soldz. [http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=9660 "When Promoting Truth Obscures the Truth: More on Iraqi Body Count and Iraqi Deaths"] {{webarchive|url=http://webarchive.loc.gov/all/20060504092259/http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=9660 |date=4 May 2006 }}. ''[[ZNet]],'' 5 February 2006.</ref> (in reference to the 2003-2005 IBC report<ref name="2003-5" />): "Given, as indicated in that report, that ten media outlets provided over half the IBC reports and three agencies [Associated Press, Agence France Presse, and Reuters] provided over a third of the reports, there is simply no reason to believe that even a large fraction of Iraqi civilian combat-related deaths are ever reported in the Western media, much less, have the two independent reports necessary to be recorded in the IBC database. Do these few agencies really have enough Iraqi reporters on retainer to cover the country? Are these reporters really able comprehensively to cover deaths in insurgent-held parts of Iraq? How likely is it that two reporters from distinct media outlets are going to be present at a given site where deaths occur? How many of the thousands of US bombings have been investigated by any reporter, Western or Iraqi? Simply to state these questions is to emphasize the fragmentary nature of the reporting that occurs and thus the limitations of the IBC database."

In a 28 April 2006 BBC ''Newsnight'' interview<ref>[http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/4950254.stm "Interview transcript – John Sloboda"]. BBC ''[[Newsnight]].'' 28 April 2006.</ref> the IBC project's co-founder John Sloboda, in response to these and similar arguments, has said: "we have never had over the entire three years, anyone show us an Arabic source that reports deaths that we haven't already got. In three years. In thousands of incidents. There are organisations that translate Arabic reports into English, and we see their data."

IBC monitors multiple Arabic sources that either publish in English as well as Arabic, or are translated by other sources. Some of these include:

Al Arabiya TV, Al-Furat, Al-Ittihad, Al Jazeera (Web), Al Jazeera TV, Al Sharqiyah TV, Al-Taakhi, Al-Bawaba, Arab News, Arabic News, Asharq Al Awsat, As-Sabah, Arab Times, Bahrain News Agency, Bahrain Times.<ref>http://www.iraqbodycount.org/sources.php "IBC sources"</ref>