"Could you put a figure on it? Seriously, I'd be interested to know if there's a way of calculating the odds."
There is a way of calculating the odds, but I can't really do it. You'd need the raw data and/or some assumptions. Basically, you'd either assume that the data was normally distributed or take a fit to the empirical distribution and look at the tails. But we are talking fractions of a per cent here; if there were 60,000 violent deaths in Iraq since the war you'd expect to find 27 deaths in a sample of 12,000, not 300. The design effect (the fact that it's a cluster survey and finding one death in a cluster means you're likely to find a few more) is going to mean that it's biased upward somewhat, but even so, for the true value to be a tenth of the sample mean is really very unlikely indeed.
caveats: 1) in some way, the numbered-streets method of selecting clusters might be much more likely to pick out high-violence areas than any other method; I don't believe this but it hasn't been tested AFAICT, 2) those bloody Iraqis (the survey team or the respondents) might be lying because they hate freedom.
best dd
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