Welcome to Morales. I'm Javier Zapata with your statistical guide to the numbers in the news and in the world.

Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Bosnia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone.

These are just some of the countries where brutal wars have erupted over the last three decades.

It's not just the soldiers who die. News reports and increasingly social media capture the agony of civilians and broadcast it to the world.

Many wonder if it's civilians rather than competent who bear the mortal brunt of war.

And there's a widely used statistic that seems to back this up.

Now 90% of casualties in war around the world are civilian. We cause civilians to resolve conflict.

It's a terrifying number and one that has been repeated by the European Union and the United Nations Development Program.

But is it true?

Adam Roberts is professor of international relations at Oxford University and he's been examining this figure.

The claim that roughly 90% of war victims are civilians in contemporary wars has been around now for about 27-28 years.

It seems to have started life in 1991 with an extraordinary publication of the institution at Uppsala, Hensweden.

They've produced a publication with this figure in it and it's just flown around the world and has almost no basis, in fact.

It included very little evidence and what evidence there was didn't add up to the conclusion they reached.

The paper by the researchers at Uppsala University in Sweden examined casualties in armed conflicts that took place between 1988 and 1989.

The researchers calculated that

Now this statement is clearly referring to fatalities and refugees, but the back cover of the paper stated in large type.

9 out of 10 victims in war and armed conflict today are civilians.

Notice the reference to refugees uprooted has disappeared.

A subsequent report from the university itself admitted that this second statement led many to mistakenly conclude

that all 90% of these war victims were fatalities.

It went on to say that the figure for civilians killed was closer to 67%.

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