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. By ignoring or forgetting the sheer destructiveness of the wars, Americans can continue on a path of seeing all foreign problems as fixable with military force. Nowadays some domestic issues are regarded in the same light, with one result being the enormous homeland security apparatus. This has been the tragic tendency of U.
The president is the commander-in-chief of the military, and as the historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. If there is no accountability for the human toll of war, the urge to deploy military assets will remain powerful. As the U. The New York Times published a story in late November about widows' hardship in Iraq , a rare instance of of an account of how the war has affected ordinary people in Iraq.
The reporter states that 86, war widows are getting assistance from the Iraqi government, and that this "corresponds with conservative estimates of , to , Iraqi deaths in the war.
Consider the 86, figure supporting the , death toll. Half of the men in Iraq are not married. A very large number of men who are killed in the violence are young, far less than the average age of first marriage, which is 25 years old in Iraq. Many children are killed or die unnecessarily due to poor health care conditions. Not all war widows are getting benefits, moreover. Between and October , the number of civilian deaths due to the Iraq war has fluctuated significantly.
As of October 31, there were documented civilian deaths in Civilian Deaths in the Iraq War Civilian casualties are the deaths of non-military individuals as a result of military operations.
The number of documented civilian deaths in the Iraq war peaked in at 29, casualties. Since then, the number had fallen to 4, casualties documented in the year , and the number of casualties have been decreasing since Due to the nature of the Iraq war and of war reporting, data cannot be considered exact.
Many civilian deaths that occurred during the war in Iraq may remain unaccounted for. Eight years later, in December , the US formally declared an end to the Iraq war.
From the start of the war in until September 30, , it is estimated that the United States spent a total of over billion US dollars on war costs in Iraq. This number includes funding requested by the President and appropriated by Congress, and accounts for both military and non-military spending. Spending was highest in , that year over billion US dollars were spent in Iraq by the United States government.
As of , about 7, U. The number of US American soldiers killed in Iraq peaked in with just over nine hundred causalities. In the same year, there were over 25, civilian deaths in Iraq. Loading statistic As of March , 11 U. This is a decrease from a peak of casualties in Additional information on fatalities in the Iraq War The invasion of Iraq by the United States and coalition forces in March saw the beginning of the Iraq War, a conflict that would continue beyond the end of the decade.
Fatalities of American forces were highest in the first five years of conflict as soldiers grappled with the Al Qaeda as well as civil war between those groups seeking to fill the power vacuum left by the removal of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. Casualties progressively decreased from , in part due to attempts by Barack Obama who made the removal of troops from Iraq a central promise of this successful campaign to succeed George W.
In , the majority of Americans considered sending troops to fight in Iraq to be a mistake. While the number of civilian deaths in the Iraq War was much higher, the trend of numbers decreasing from onward was in line with the trend for American solider losses.
However, civilian deaths rose again from onward as Iraq returned to heavy conflict with Islamic State. The high number of American fatalities in the first five years of the Iraq War could be seen as influencing the reluctance of the United States to commit ground troop support in the battle against Islamic State when the issue was discussed in Not only is the loss of life a tragedy in itself, but the political discourse in the United States surrounding the involvement of their troops in Middle Eastern conflicts has made further involvement unattractive to elected officials.
However calls for further ground support are likely to continue as Iraq remained in the top five countries with the most terrorist attacks as of Loading statistic Show source. Download for free You need to log in to download this statistic Register for free Already a member? Iraqi men mourn a relative, likely the victim of sectarian killing, who was found shot dead with 14 other people in May Witnesses reported seeing the men being arrested by interior ministry commandos at a market near Baghdad before being driven away.
No one knows with certainty how many people have been killed and wounded in Iraq since the United States invasion.
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