For John Sloboda, a British professor of psychology, the most important fact to come out of the war in Iraq is the number of civilians killed.

It’s a number, he says, that will allow the people of Iraq to eventually mourn their dead and move forward with rebuilding their nation. To not count civilian deaths, he says, “We are telling them that we don’t consider them human, and perhaps we are saying we are less than human.”

While neither the US nor British governments is taking an official count of civilian deaths in the war in Iraq, others have taken up the cause. The Iraq Body Count (www.iraqbodycount.org), co-founded by Sloboda, is the best-known effort and is based on media reports of individual incidents in Iraq. Its most recent figures indicate more than 30,000 have been killed. Another well-known count, led by researchers at Johns Hopkins University, used door-to-door interviews in Iraq.

There’s plenty of debate over how accurate these figures are. And it’s a politically charged issue that raises the questions of how important it is to keep track of civilian deaths — morally, strategically and historically — and who’s responsible for doing so.

US military officials say keeping a consistent and reliable count of civilian deaths would take such a significant effort that it would likely detract from the military’s overall mission.

“What baseline would you have us start with in Iraq?” says US Army Lt. Col. Barry Venable, a Pentagon spokesman. First, he says, you need to know how many people were in Iraq at the start of the war. And besides a reliable census, Venable says, the military would need “tentacles into all of the health facilities, and you would have to have insights into the minds and intentions and activities of insurgents who purposely kill Iraqis.”

While acknowledging the flaws of their own efforts, the people behind nongovernment counts say their estimates are better than none and will prove to be of historical importance. Sloboda, a professor of psychology at Keele University, says he co-founded the Iraq Body Count with London-based researcher Hamit Dardagan when he learned that neither the US nor British governments were keeping any official tally.

“It’s shocking,” he says. “The neglect by the Blair and Bush administrations is disgraceful — there’s no other word for it.”

Knowing how many have died is necessary for any society to recover after a crisis, Sloboda says. He points to the attack on the World Trade Center and the urgency to come up with a number. “The American people did not rest until every single victim was identified and named,” he says. “This is an absolute natural human impulse — you cannot move on until someone has been memorialized.”

The researchers at Iraq Body Count rely on press reports that come out of Iraq. Each report is tracked for several days before any figures are entered into the data. An initial report of “20 dead and 30 injured,” for instance, could change significantly over a few days.

“We wait until the stories stop, and then we use the final figure,” he says. “We always rely on there being two individual sources to avoid rogue reporters or politically motivated reporting.” The Web site is updated at least once a week, with a minimum and maximum estimate. Wednesday, the low number was 26,982 and the high 30,380. Since the news media can’t report on all deaths, Sloboda figures even the high figure is lower than the actual number of deaths.

Sloboda says he believes the Iraq Body Count is the first database of its type. As early as the 1991 Gulf War, he said, it wouldn’t have been possible because the Internet wasn’t advanced enough to make searching for news reports plausible.

Another study arrived at the much higher estimate of 100,000 deaths from the start of the war to mid-2004. It was published in the Lancet, a British medical journal, in October last year. Les Roberts, of the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University, led the study and stayed in Iraq for about one month interviewing residents at 1,000 homes in randomly selected areas of the country. Because the report acknowledges its own wide margin of error, though, government officials placed little value on it.

Conducting the study meant traveling through some of the country’s most tumultuous areas. At one point, Roberts lay on the floor of an SUV to hide from Iraqi soldiers. Another time, he watched his two interpreters whisked away by Iraqi police. They were returned safely shortly after. Roberts says the risks were worth it both for practical and humanitarian reasons.

Without a good idea of how many have died, he says, “I think that it’s hard to know whether things are really going well.”

And if no one made an effort to find out how many people were killed by Hurricane Katrina, he says, “our leaders would be taken to task in the most brutal of ways for not being sensitive to the value of life. It would say we really don’t care that much about those individuals.”

Keeping track of wartime deaths, say military officials, is much more complicated than many realize. Although the military does keep rough estimates of civilians killed by insurgents, Venable says, a reliable estimate on all deaths in Iraq would be nearly impossible.

“It would be extraordinarily complicated, which is one of the reasons why we don’t attempt it,” he says. “We enter the fight with full cognizance of our responsibility to not inflict harm and to avoid as much collateral damage as possible.”

Sloboda says the refusal to keep track has less to do with logistics than fear of bad publicity.

“They’ve said different things at different times,” he says. “I think politics is at the heart of this, and it’s not politically convenient.”

He’s confident that eventually there will be a final and accurate count, possibly with an extensive door-to-door census. Perhaps it will be done by the United Nations or the new Iraqi government, he says. For now, the current estimates can serve as the first step toward a complete study.

“There are gaps, but one day every one of those gaps will be filled,” he says of the current data. “It has to happen. The Iraqi people will make it happen.”