They died in a host of ways. The causes of death include rocket-propelled grenade fire and the improvised explosive devices that have been responsible for roughly half of all deaths and injuries in Iraq and Afghanistan. Their deaths were also the result of vehicle crashes, electrocutions, heatstroke, friendly fire, and suicides in theater.
Official Pentagon numbers do not include the many troops who return home and kill themselves as a result of psychological wounds such as PTSD. The VA could be doing more to address this mental health crisis. As this earlier and more complete report from Reuters details, "Iraqi women say registering for government pensions is a bureaucratic nightmare due to corrupt workers who demand money to complete the paperwork. One divorcee said she spent almost a year registering and when she was about to finish the process the pension office told her that her file had been lost.
She gave up. This one metric, then--numbers of war widows, estimated to be 2 million for all wars--indicates a minimum of , deaths due to the war, not , Given that we do not know how many women will claim benefits, the actual figure is likely two to three times that. Recent reports on Iraqis displaced by war show a chronic disaster.
The conditions in the settlements are extremely poor. One reason for the trickle of returnees may be the Iraqi economy: Another U. Among the consequences of war is the corrosion of social and institutional barriers to crime, and none is sadder than the rise of human trafficking. Iraq is apparently undergoing a spell of increasing trafficking, or at least more noticeable violations of sexual and labor trafficking.
A few weeks ago, the State Department issued its annual assessment of human trafficking worlwide, and Iraq was criticized for nearly non-existent enforcement of laws relating to both forced prostitution and involuntary labor servitude. Journalists reports confirm that the problems are acute and possibly growing. August The nearly , documents released by the NGO muckraker, Wikileaks , on October 22, , shows greater brutality toward civilians than the U.
Government and the news media have heretofore acknowledged. Rampaging security contractors like Xe and abuse of detainees are particularly notable. But the documents give the impression that fatalties in the war "only" totaled , or so, counting civilians killed by direct violence.
This is misleading. The New York Times and the Associated Press both used this "baseline" and asserted it to be in keeping with several other estimates. Active surveillance using randomized household surveys is a superior method, and in the two most recent, credible surveys, between , and , Iraqi deaths were estimated, including all Iraqis and all causes. See this peer-reviewed journal Conflict and Health on the different methods used in Iraq.
BBC has delved into the different gauges of mortality more than any other major news media source. The Guardian 's " Data Blog " also has a map and additional insights. AlterNet's article on the controversy, by this site's editor, is here. While still somewhat speculative, the science-based methods suggest a total of between , and one million "excess deaths" to date resulting from the war. The large estimate has recently been affirmed by one of the longest-serving Iraqi correspondents in the war, Sahar Issa of McClatchy New Service, an award-winning reporter, who described the IBC and Wikileaks-related estimates "laughable.
Anthony Shadid's moving account of Iraqis searching for bodies of loved ones at the Baghdad morgue is a rare glimpse of the human cost of the war. August 27, It was 20 yearts ago, in August , when Saddam Hussein recklessly occupied Kuwait, which drew the U. How did this come to pass, and why? An analysis. In an atttempt to prod the U.
Noting haphazard reporting and loosely defined guidance for who should be compensated, among related mismanagement, CIVIC makes a strong case for creating uniform rules, implementing training for judge advocates and troops, and keeping better records.
And denial of claims can be routine: "Most convoy cases. June, The infamous video released in early April by the investigative Web site Wikileaks, showing a U. First is the sheer brutality of war, which few Americans ever see, and the apparently cavalier attitudes about killing.
Second is the now well-documented fact that the Pentagon lied about the incident, and when Wikileaks released the video, attacked the editors of the Web site. The consequences for the Iraqi civilian victims received virtually no attention. Two of the soldiers on the ground who arrived at the scene subsequently apologized to the Iraqi people.
As if to verify the findings of the article in Conflict and Health , the BBC correspondent in Baghdad has a valuable contribution that explains how and why the Iraqi government downplays violence and casualties Dec. A medical doctor told her that there are explosions every day that are never reproted in the press. The peer-reviewed journal Conflict and Health published November a study of the way the major news media are reporting casualty figures from the Iraq War, and note that "U. In four of the five non-US newspapers, the pattern was reversed.
Furthermore, this calls into question the role of the media in reporting and sustaining armed conflict, and the extent to which newspaper and other media reports can be used as data to assess fatalities or trends in the time of war. Henderson, M. Coincidentally, their findings are reflected in a just-released journalistic treatment of mortality estimates from Iraq, among other issues, in Newspeak in the 21st Century , by David Edwards amd David Cromwell Pluto Press , of the watchdog group, Media Lens.
An ABC News survey March in Iraq conducted by D3 Systems shows improvement in some categories, such as belief in democracy and overall security, but some surprising levels of discontent and lack of basic human services. More than half believe the U. One-quarter of all Iraqis, and much higher numbers of Arabs, said they witnessed "unnecessary violence" against Iraqis by U.
The data they did release and its analysis is here. That is one of every eleven women from the age of 15 to Given the population bulge in the age range that would be affected by the current war, and the high numbers of young men killed who are not married, the estimate of widows translates into a very high mortality figure. For example, if half the widows are from the current war, and one-third of those who have died as a result of the war are not married--both conservative assumptions--then more than , have been killed as a result of the U.
That figure would not include the number of women and children who have died as a result of the war's privations or from direct violence. The Times has generally been quite cautious in its reporting on the war's human costs, so this article represents a breakthrough in its journalism. Read it here. Two weeks later the Times reported on mental health studies done in Iraq among women, finding that 17 percent of those surveyed are suffering from serious, war-related mental illness.
Read the March 7 article. It is based in part on a large household survey conducted by the World Health Organization. Read more.
A new analysis of the total fatalities in the Iraq war during the presidency of George W. Bush demonstrates that the likely number is between , and 1. The analysis appears in The Nation Feb. It has been translated into four languages and has appeared in more than 3, publications and on-line websites. The U. This number exceeds the total displaced by every war since , except World War II.
These alternatives would have been far less costly in human lives. For example, the U. The formation of Islamist militant groups spreading throughout the region counts among the many human costs of that war.
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