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UK to post Iraq casualties online
The 100th British fatality was reached earlier this week, prompting fresh calls from anti-war campaigners for British troops to pull out.
Casualty figures for British troops injured in Iraq will be published on the Ministry of Defence's (MoD) web site within weeks, the government disclosed.
Defence Secretary John Reid said Thursday the figures would be regularly updated and identify the number of personnel categorised as seriously injured or very seriously injured.
Reid announced on January 20 that about 230 British troops had been injured in enemy action in Iraq since the US-led invasion in March 2003. Of those, 40 suffered life-threatening injuries.
Until then, London had only confirmed that 98 of its servicemen and women had died in Iraq, two-thirds of whom are thought to have died in enemy action.
The 100th British fatality was reached earlier this week, prompting fresh calls from anti-war campaigners for British troops to pull out.
The announcement of "rolling" casualty figures marks a turnaround for the government, which had been accused of a cover-up because of the lack of any definitive, publicly-available casualty figure.
Reid rebutted the claims, even saying that categorising the injured, wounded and sick was "not a priority" for forces in Iraq.
The defence secretary has since conceded that the figure of 230 wounded in action did not reflect the true scale of British casualties and that there may have been many more.
The Scotsman newspaper had said the MoD seriously underestimated the number of soldiers injured since the start of the conflict by only counting admissions to one field hospital.
