At least 150,000 Iraqis died violently in the 40 months after the US-led invasion in 2003, according to an estimate derived from the most comprehensive survey yet of mortality in post-war Iraq.

The new estimate, based on an Iraqi government survey supervised by the World Health Organisation, falls in the middle of the two most commonly cited assessments of the death toll following the invasion. It is published in an article in the New England Journal of Medicine.