Around 100,000 Iraqis have been killed in violence since the US-led coalition forces invaded the country in March 2003, a report published on Friday in British medicine journal The Lancet said.

More than half of those who've died were women and children killed in air strikes, American public health experts said in the latest issue of the magazine.

The study, which was carried out in 33 randomly chosen neighborhoods of Iraq representative of the entire population, shows that violence is now the leading cause of death in Iraq.

Householders were asked about births and deaths in the 14.6 months before the invasion, and births and deaths in the 17.8 months afterwards.

Before the invasion, most people died of heart attacks, stroke and chronic illness. The risk of a violent death is now 58 times higher than it was before the invasion, said the scientists at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore.

"The use of air power in areas with lots of civilians appears to be killing a lot of women and children," the paper said, adding that the researchers have evidence of the use of air power in populated urban areas and the bad consequences of it.

The biggest death toll recorded by the researchers was in Falluja, a stronghold of Iraqi insurgents, which registered two-thirds of the violent deaths they found.

However, US troops prepared on Friday for a big assault on Sunni Muslim rebels and Arab fighters in the Iraqi cities of Falluja and Ramadi.

(China Daily October 30, 2004)