Estimates on the death toll in any widespread regional conflict always vary wildly. You can easily detect people's political bias by which end of the scale they regard as most accurate... ;-)

In Vietnam, for instance, there were body counts of enemy dead announced in the US media after most battles. Those body counts were generally wildly exaggerated to give the impression that the Americans were doing just great at killing commies.

Now if it had been the other way around, and the USA military had wanted for some reason to give the impression that they were NOT killing large numbers of people, well, then, they would just have divided the real body count by 10 instead of multiplying it by ten. It all depends what impression you want to create in those impressionable minds back home...