The figure actually comes from the South Ossetian government's initial statement. IIRC HRW (look at all those acronyms) obtains its figure from looking at numbers of bodies in the morgue, and so does not include bodies lost under rubble, etc. How you could shell a city for a day with heavy artillery (nerf missiles?) and only kill 44 people is hard for me to understand.
--- On Tue, 8/19/08, Gar Lipow <the.typo.boy at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> According to Human Rights Watch, the actual number of
> deaths at the
> hands of Georgian troops is more like 44 than 1,500 to
> 2,000.
> http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/aug/13/georgia
> Don't know if we
> should believe either figure. But since the higher number
> was used as
> justification for an invasion surely we should not
> automatically take
> Russia's word for it.
>