The "shock and awe" campaign killed 7, Iraqi civilians in two months. No other period of America's years-long counterinsurgency or its air war against the Islamic State has approached this level of lethality. Hover over bar segments to see monthly figures. A wave of sectarian violence made the deadliest year for Iraqi civilians overall. Of known parties, the Islamic State has killed the most civilians. June , the height of the Islamic State's conquest, marked the deadliest single month for Iraqi civilians.
The initial months of the U. Rules of engagement matter. Coalition forces fought three battles to retake the city of Fallujah from insurgents—twice in , and once in They killed far fewer civilians the third time. Full Timeline: Explore the Data. Key Events. Read our other stories:.
Memorial Day and Veterans. Hate Crimes. Refugees in America. Of the 76 countries in which the US is currently fighting terrorism , at least three have been incredibly deadly: Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Brown University's Costs of War Project recently released a report detailing just how deadly they've been.
The report accounts for deaths in Afghanistan and Pakistan between October and October , and in Iraq between March and October In October , the US invaded Afghanistan to defeat the al-Qaeda and the Taliban, but little progress has been made after more than 17 years of war.
In March , the US invaded Iraq and overthrew Saddam Hussein's regime under the pretense that the regime had weapons of mass destruction, most notably nuclear weapons. Pakistan is a little murkier. Several estimates based on randomly selected household surveys place the total death count among Iraqis in the hundreds of thousands. Several times as many Iraqi civilians may have died as an indirect result of the war, due to damage to the systems that provide food, health care and clean drinking water, and as a result, illness, infectious diseases, and malnutrition that could otherwise have been avoided or treated.
The war has compounded the ill effects of decades of harmful U. Total "persons of concern" exceed 3 million. Health-related impacts on children in Iraq , from the Brussels Tribunal and Global Research, Canada, dewscribes the broad effects on children, including birth defects, cancer, denial of rights, etc. February Environmental Contaminants from War Remnants in Iraq , a well-documented report that focuses mainly on depleted uranium and its carcinogenic qualities. Birth defects in Fallujah, Iraq, rise markedly, says a medical study.
Fallujah, the largest city in Anbar province, was the scene of two enormous battles between US forces and "insurgents. Metal contamination: "Within less than a decade, the occurrence of congenital birth defects increased by an astonishing fold in the same hospital. The withdrawal of U. Professor Juan Cole had this to say:. The American public still for the most part has no idea what the United States did to that country, and until we Americans take responsibility for the harm we do others with our perpetual wars, we can never recover from our war sickness, which drives us to resort to violence in international affairs in a way no other democracy routinely does.
Number of Iraqis killed in attacks in November Average monthly civilian deaths in Afghanistan War , first half of Percentage of Iraqis who lived in slum conditions in Number of the 30 million Iraqis living below the poverty line: 7 million. Number of Iraqis who died of violence , to , Orphans in Iraq : 4.
Number of women, mainly widows, who are primary breadwinners in family: 2 million. Iraqi refugees displaced by the American war to Syria: 1 million. Internally displaced [pdf] persons in Iraq: 1. Rank of Iraq on Corruption Index among countries: War has a powerful impact on those who have lived through one, bending every calculation, every thought, every action to the possible consequences of violence, deprivation, displacement and the other ravages of conflict.
Oddly, war has become a distant occurrence for most of us in the industrialized West. The armed forces of Canada and the United States are all-volunteer and have been for many years, so very few who are unwilling to go to war or work in war zones are actually forced to experience its maelstrom.
But the people who live in war zones do, of course. Many millions of them are directly affected by the violence, now for more than a decade in Afghanistan in its latest war and for nearly nine years in Iraq in a war that followed 12 years of crippling sanctions and the short but intense Operation Desert Storm. The amount of public attention to Afghanistan and Iraq has declined steadily.
We scarcely pay attention to what has happened to the native populations. There are, perhaps, political and psychological reasons for this indifference—a turning away from the violence, a mission gone bad, falsehoods proffered by politicians, and many others. But the indifference is unmistakable. The news media rarely describes the ruinous consequences of U. Few, if any, novels, films or other cultural expressions attempt to capture this suffering either.
But we forget at our peril. We should care about what happens to these people and their societies, not only for moral reasons, but also because forgetting has consequences.
In fact, the numbers of fatalities are significantly higher and need to be studied for their implications. This is not a number that most American politicians want to consider.
Even as the U. There is very little on how the war has affected ordinary Iraqis. On Afghanistan, a far less violent conflict compared with Iraq, we have even less information. The U. No household surveys have been conducted in Afghanistan. This was also true of the wars in Korea and Indochina, where estimates are largely guesswork. Overall, my best estimate of excess deaths in Afghanistan is around ,, but it is an inadequate estimate, as all are for this beleaguered country.
Now the wars wind down under another illusion of validity, which is that the civilians harmed by the wars are relatively few. This is repeated so often, sometimes with reference to the Iraq Body Count or UN numbers, however hollow their credibility, that absurdly low estimates have become conventional wisdom. It is so much so that even the liberal media, like National Public Radio or the New York Times , rarely explore the human costs of the war to Iraqis or Afghanis.
These illusions, which feed indifference, have consequences. Others in the Muslim world particularly notice this callousness. It does not reflect well on America that many believe it to be a reckless bully unmindful of the havoc it wreaked, nor on Britain and Canada that they are camp followers of this recklessness.
The consequences for the United States are even more dramatic if considering the domestic political scene.
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