US, British and other coalition forces have killed more than 19,000 "suspected insurgents" in Iraq since 2003, but can account for fewer than 7000 enemy wounded, figures obtained by The Herald show.

A senior US officer acknowledged for the first time yesterday that a body count of opposition casualties has been kept since 2003, despite repeated denials by the Pentagon.

The UK Ministry of Defence does not keep a central record of "kills" by British soldiers, although estimated enemy losses appear in individual units' after-action reports.

A Pentagon source said yesterday that the figures compiled in Iraq were for "all coalition forces".

He claimed he did not have a breakdown by country, but added it would not be wildly inaccurate to speculate that British troops had killed "more than 1000 enemy combatants" in clashes from Al Amara to Basra over the past four years.

The practice of tallying enemy losses was discredited in Vietnam as US troops inflated the numbers of Viet Cong guerrillas and North Vietnamese regulars killed, even burying bodies and digging them back up on the next patrol to count them again.

Brigadier-General Joseph Anderson, chief of staff for the multinational corps in Iraq, said: "We're not focused on the numbers, but on most operations, we have fairly quantifiable data. That data is maintained to allow us to get a feel for the scale of what's happening on the ground."

The figures compiled by the US show that 19,429 insurgent suspects had been reported killed, 6994 wounded and 119,752 arrested since 2003.

Soldiers normally sustain three wounded for each man killed in action. Improvements in body armour and front-line medicine have changed that ratio to eight wounded for every man dead.

A source said: "The high level of enemy combatant dead to wounded is not a product of any shoot-to-kill policy. The insurgents, either Iraqis or foreign jihadis, tend to drag their wounded off after firefights.

"We capture a relatively low number as a result, usually when the rest of their cell or ambush group has been wiped out or forced to flee by the arrival of coalition reinforcements. There's nothing sinister in the ratios.

"They also sustain more fatalities because they do not have access to effective body armour or immediate medical treatment.

"Our figures are compiled from significant after-action reports received from units in the field. Where air strikes involving large munitions are involved, it often has to be an estimate. On other occasions involving gunfire, there is an actual body count of armed combatants."

A US military spokesman said reports of enemy casualties were gleaned from routine reports after every firefight involving coalition troops.

British soldiers from the Princess of Wales Royal Regiment holding CIMIC House, a government building in Al Amara, are understood to have killed at least 200 Mehdi Army militiamen when the base came under attack for 23 days and nights in August 2004.

Many hundreds more died in clashes with UK patrols in and around Basra and Az Zubayr, an insurgent stronghold eight miles from the south's main city.