Welcome
Conventional wisdom in American politics focuses only on American costs in the war in Iraq: the casualties to U.S. soldiers, the financial costs, and sometimes the strategic costs. But the human cost to the Iraqis themselves are nearly ignored in political discourse, the news media, and intellectual circles. This site is a corrective to those oversights. We present empirical reports, studies, and other accounts that convey and assess the consequences of war for the people of Iraq.
Recent
End of U.S. troops occasions minor reflection on war & destruction
The withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq has spurred little new information on the scale of destruction in the 8 year, 8 month war. 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.
Population of Iraq: 30 million.
Number of Iraqis killed in attacks in November 2011: 187
Average monthly civilian deaths in Afghanistan War, first half of 2011: 243
Percentage of Iraqis who lived in slum conditions in 2000: 17
Percentage of Iraqis who live in slum conditions in 2011: 50
Number of the 30 million Iraqis living below the poverty line: 7 million.
Number of Iraqis who died of violence 2003-2011: 150,000 to 400,000.
Orphans in Iraq: 4.5 million.
Orphans living in the streets: 600,000.
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: 1.3 million
Proportion of displaced persons who have returned home since 2008: 1/8
Rank of Iraq on Corruption Index among 182 countries: 175
From the Canadian International Council website, the editor of this page, John Tirman, wrote (Dec. 16):
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.
And there’s the rub: war devastates these places, but to us they are remote and largely forgettable. 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.S. policy and war-making for Afghanis and Iraqis. Few, if any, novels, films or other cultural expressions attempt to capture this suffering either.
This broad tendency to forget, or intentionally put aside, the ravages of war was evident during and after the Korean War (1950-53) and the Indochina wars in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos in the 1960s and early ’70s. 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.
Counting the Dead
One symptom of this indifference is the absence of an adequate accounting of the wars’ destruction, particularly of war mortality. The governments don’t discuss it, and the news media reliably report the lowest conceivable numbers—“tens of thousands” is the usual formulation for Iraq – or the partial numbers collated by the U.N. office in Kabul for Afghanistan. In fact, the numbers of fatalities are significantly higher and need to be studied for their implications.
In Iraq, some brave attempts to collect and analyze data about war-related mortality have at least given us a sense of the scale of mayhem. Several household surveys, the state-of-the-art method favored by epidemiologists, indicate a death toll reaching well into the hundreds of thousands. (This includes all Iraqis, not just civilians, from direct violence and indirectly due to other factors – so-called excess deaths above the pre-war mortality rate.) Even the oft-cited tally of Iraq Body Count, a U.K.-based NGO, holds that more than 100,000 civilians have died as a result of violence. IBC’s method is crude and incomplete—it gathers data mainly from English-language newspapers—and they acknowledge an undercount by at least a factor of two. The lowest estimate of all the household surveys—a large, randomized sample conducted by the Ministry of Health in the spring of 2006—was 400,000 excess deaths in the 2003-2006 period, and there was still a lot of killing to come. By using data on widows, displaced persons (up to 5 million), and the household surveys, I estimate the number of war-related dead to be at least 600,000 and possibly as much as one million.
This is not a number that most American politicians want to consider. What’s more puzzling is the reaction of the news media, which have generally failed to report on the war’s destruction. Even as the U.S. military exits Iraq, the news media’s treatment focuses on American soldiers returning home or questions the future stability of Iraq in the absence of U.S. troops. 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.N. office gathers data from morgues, the military and news reports, but this “passive surveillance” captures only a fraction of the war dead and cannot explain what is being missed. No household surveys have been conducted in Afghanistan. So we have only the sketchiest notions of the war’s human toll. (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 100,000, but it is an inadequate estimate, as all are for this beleaguered country.
The Illusion of Validity
The low numbers the news media and political leaders use to describe the outcome of these wars provide an unintentional symmetry to the conflicts: the conflicts began under an illusion of validity, to borrow a phrase from psychologist Daniel Kahneman, which in Iraq was Saddam Hussein’s purported “weapons of mass destruction” and in Afghanistan was the purported hot pursuit of Osama bin Laden. 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.S. policy makers since 1945. The president is the commander-in-chief of the military, and as the historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., said of previous armed ventures, war above all nourishes the presidency. If there is no accountability for the human toll of war, the urge to deploy military assets will remain powerful.
Colin Powell famously said that invading a country means following the Pottery Barn rule, “If you break it, you own it.” The sad fact is that we broke Iraq and may be breaking Afghanistan, but we don’t “own it.” We scarcely recall that we ever had anything to do with it. As the U.S. withdraws from Iraq, the season of forgetting is upon us.
Widows in Iraq indicate scale of killing during U.S. war
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 86,000 war widows are getting assistance from the Iraqi government, and that this "corresponds with conservative estimates of 103,000 to 113,000 Iraqi deaths in the war."
This supposition is typical of the news media nowadays, which regularly reports the lowest estimates for war mortality. Consider the 86,000 figure supporting the 103-113,000 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. Women also die in war; approximately 10% of violent deaths were women.
Not all war widows are getting benefits, moreover. 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." The 2009 law to compensate widows was only put into effect last summer, so the numbers of women who have not even been registered is unknown and possibly very large.
This one metric, then--numbers of war widows, estimated to be 2 million for all wars--indicates a minimum of 250,000 deaths due to the war, not 100,000. Given that we do not know how many women will claim benefits, the actual figure is likely two to three times that. (Nov. 28)
Reports on displaced paint grim picture of poverty and status
Recent reports on Iraqis displaced by war show a chronic disaster. In a Brookings-LSE account, for example, scholar Elizabeth Ferris writes: "The governments of the region have generally allowed them to remain but haven’t recognized them as refugees nor given them formal residency rights. Not yet persuaded that it’s safe to return to their country, they live in limbo." UNHCR, the UN agency for refugees, noted in a July report that "an estimated 1.3 million IDPs are in Iraq. 467,565 IDPs and destitute persons reside in 382 settlements countrywide. The conditions in the settlements are extremely poor." Only one in eight of Iraqi displaced persons has returned to their homes since the violence subsided in 2008, says the agency. One reason for the trickle of returnees may be the Iraqi economy: Another U.N. agency says that more than half of all Iraqis live in “slum conditions,” compared with 17 percent in 2000. (Sept. 30)
Human trafficking reports fault Iraqi state
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. "Violence against women appears to be increasing, though it is difficult to be sure," says an assessment in Middle East Report. "Though Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and MADRE have published field reports, this violence remains one of the least studied aspects of post-invasion Iraq." The link to poverty among women--some 75 percent say they have no propsects for jobs or very few prospects--may explain a rising incidence of sexual trafficking, prostitution, and child abuse. (August 29)
The "new" violence in Iraq
Violence is rising again in Iraq....or it's at least getting more attention. Bombings are widely attributed to the withdrawal later this year of U.S. troops, as the Washington Post reports here (June 21), and Moktada al-Sadr, the Shia firebrand, is threatening to reactivate his Madhi militia if the government allows U.S. troops to remain beyond 2011. Political stalemate in Iraq is also adding to the political tensions.
As usual, however, much of the structural violence is scarcely reported. A striking, if brief,report in the Christian Science Monitor noted high maternal mortality due to a lack of medical personnel, deaths which would not be considered war-related in most databases. It noted "medical experts’ concerns that an increasing number of Iraqi women are dying of complications from childbirth because violence in the country prevents them from seeking care. The maternal mortality ratio has tripled since 1990 because of a lack of access to emergency care, and since the 2003 Iraqi war that disposed Saddam Hussein, the proportion of Iraqi women giving birth at home has increased to about two-thirds. In addition, 80% of these women do not have any skilled attendants present during childbirth. Medical experts believe that the number of maternal deaths has further increased since 2003, but they worry the deaths go undocumented because of ongoing violence. UNFPA has said that the war and its repercussions have made an existing problem 'suddenly become very much worse.'”
In a report of the U.N. Security Council, they note that "The humanitarian situation in Iraq has moved from an emergency context to
one of fragile early recovery. However, continued violence has destroyed the social
services infrastructure and access to basic services, such as water and sanitation,
health care and education, remains limited especially for children. Traditional
systems of physical, social and legal protection have also been severely
compromised by the conflict and, as a result, children have become more vulnerable
to exploitation and abuse." Among the threats to children are cluster bomblets and landmines that the U.S. and other combatants have deployed in the country.
Only 105,000 Iraqi refugees returned to Iraq in the year ending May 1. That translates into no more than 3 percent of all refugees (and that does not include internally displaced persons, those who have not crossed borders), which are estimated at about 3 million. The slow trickle of refugees, many of whom are in difficult circumstances in Syria, Jordan and elsewhere, is a clear indication of their lack of confidence in Iraq's security and econonmic environment.
So while there is some renewed attention to the human security deficit in Iraq, the U.N. and other agencies have been reporting a rather troubling picture for Iraqis all along.
Tensions in Kirkuk worsening
According to several sources, the tensions in the contested city of Kirkuk are worsening and may erupt as U.S. forces depart. Kirkuk, in an Arab province of Iraq, has long been claimed by Kurds. It is oil rich, and this is the principal source of the conflict that now affects the three major groups--Arabs, both Sunni and Shia; Turkmen, who are of Turkish origin; and Kurds. A leader of the Turkmens had his home attacked with firebombs recently, the first time that has happened, according to a column in a prominent Turkish newspaper, Zaman. In late March, a report from the International Crisis Group also underscored the tensions. It notes: "Arab-Kurdish relations remain a tinderbox. In late February, the Kurdistan regional government sent military forces into Kirkuk in a transparent attempt to both deflect attention from [protests] in Suleimaniya and rally the Kurdish population around the supremely emotive issue of Kirkuk’s status. In doing so, it dangerously inflamed an already tense situation and exacerbated ethnic tensions." While violence nationwide remains worrisome--about 250 violent deaths are reported monthly in 2011, according to Agence France Press--the Kirkuk situation is seen as the most volatile. The energy interests at work are neatly summarized in Foreign Policy by Denise Natali of National Defense University. (May 16, 2011).
Mideast protests affecting north Iraq, Baghdad
The uphevals in Egypt, Tunisia and other Arab countries have affected Iraq, too, as demands for better services continue to reverberate in Baghdad. Remarkably, this populist surge has come to the Kurdish provinces, too. Despite new oil riches, "many Kurds complain that they have seen little of the new wealth," notes a Reuters report. "Far too much power has been concentrated in the hands of the parties, and their duopoly has allowed corruption to run rampant and dissent to be stifled, protesters say." Some clashes have become violent, as on April 1, when 35 people were killed in Sulaimaniyah. Large protests against the stifling, tribally-led political parties have been daily since mid-February. The growing sense of political turmoil nationwide occasioned a Carnegie Endowment study, which notes how the Maliki government is shaken and many provincial governors have resigned.
New Analysis: Iraq Body Count missing 60-80% of fatalities
A new analysis coming from the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University cross-checked the reports of violent deaths in the Iraq War as recorded by the news media--and used in the Iraq Body Count database--and the U.S. military and released last autumn by Wikileaks. Each method has limitations, because the news media and American soldiers see only part of the violence, and have no way of knowing what is being missed. This is underscored in the new analysis: Iraq Body count records only about 20 percent of the fatalities listed in the U.S. military "after action" reports. This suggests that actual, violent deaths of Iraq civilians is likely to be close to 400,000 at a minimum. This also does not count those considered to be combatants, nor deaths from non-violent conditions, such as the deterioration of the health system. (March 6, 2011 - to be updated)
"Days of Rage" in Iraq as Arab anger targets Baghdad
"In Baghdad, protesters recently carried posters showing a finger marked with ink that signifies an Iraqi has voted. Now that finger is being bitten by a set of teeth," NPR reported on February 28. "That's the protesters' main message here in Iraq, so far. We don't want to change the regime. We just want our elected officials to do better. Yet officials still seem unnerved. Last week, state TV launched a campaign suggesting protesters are loyalists of Saddam Hussein, or worse, terrorists. Journalists and intellectuals have been detained, interrogated, and beaten." Listen. The unrest in much of the Arab world has let Prime Minister Maliki to vow reform, and to step down at the end of his term.
Audit of wartime contractors finds abuse, waste
The official Commission on Wartime contracting released a comprehensive report on the ways 200,000 contractors--an unprecedented number--have been used in Iraq and Afghanistan, and found that tens of billions of dollars have been wasted. "Criminal behavior and blatant corruption sap dollars from what could otherwise be successful project outcomes and, more disturbingly, contribute to a climate in which huge amounts of waste are accepted as the norm," said this early version. A final report from the bipartisan commission will be released in the summer. No mention of contractors' roles in violence was mentioned (March 1)
Report: Returnees Bitter, Leaving Iraq
The popular myth of "the new Iraq" is undermined by the hard facts besetting those who have returned from exile. The U.N. survey cited below (Oct. 19) earned some background in the New York Times (November 26, 2010). "As they return, pulled by improved security in Iraq or pushed by a lack of work abroad, many are finding that their homeland is still not ready — their houses are gone or occupied, their neighborhoods unsafe, their opportunities minimal." Read the whole story.
Wikileaks releases damning--but misleading--documents on Iraq
The nearly 400,000 documents released by the NGO muckraker, Wikileaks, on October 22 shows greater brutality toward civilians than the U.S. Government and the news media have heretofore been willing to admit. 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 115,000 or so, counting civilians killed by direct violence. This is likely very misleading. The New York Times and the Associated Press both used this "baseline" and asserted it to be in keeping with several other estimates.
The U.S. documents released by Wikileaks suffer from the same shortcomings that also afflict those "several other estimates"--Iraq Body Count, the Brookings Index, and the U.N. mission in Baghdad: they use "passive surveillance" methods that capture only what is reported by a small and unsystematic effort. Active surveillance using randomized household surveys is a superior method, and in the two most recent, credible surveys, between 400,000 and 650,000 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 700,000 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." Read her interview.
New U.N. poll in Iraq: Refugees regret returning
A large survey of families that have returned to their homes and neighborhoods--people who fled because of the war--now express regret at having returned. Horrid conditions--insecurity, economic disarray, and poor hygenic consitions--are leading causes of this despair. Less than 20,000 have returned from abroad, of more than 2.5 million; and 90,000 from internal displacement (of between 1.5 and 2 million estimated). "Almost 80 per cent of those that returned to Karkh and Resafa [in Baghdad] said they did not go to their original place of residence, either due to the general insecurity or because they still feared direct persecution," a study summary says. "A total 11 per cent cited poor economic conditions and unemployment as reasons for not returning to their former homes and neighbourhoods." The poll was released October 19, 2010. Read.
Amnesty International alleges 30,000 detainees in Iraq
After the US military turned over an estimated 10,000 detainees, many of them held without any due process, the numbers now in Iraqi prisons number 30,000, according to a new Amnesty International report. "Several detainees are known to have died in custody, apparently as a result of torture or other ill-treatment by Iraqi interrogators and prison guards, who regularly refuse to confirm their detention or whereabouts to relatives," says AI. The treatment of detainees--Iraqis often arrested because they belong to the wrong political party, or for completely accidental reasons--has been a source of concern to the U.S. authorities, but corrections have been inadequate and may be worsening as the political situation continued to be factionalized. (Sept. 13, 2010)
Finding the dead among the ruins of Iraq
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. Read.
BBC asks, "How many have died in Iraq?"
BBC World Service aired a useful analysis of the mortality issue, pegged to Iraq Body Count's demand that the UK government investigate the officially ignored issue. (August 27, 2010).
Iraq Violence and Political Chaos Belie "Victory" Narrative
As US troops have withdrawn from a combat role in Iraq, much is made of the progress Iraq has witnessed in lower violence, returning refugees, and other indicators. But the cup is at best half full, underscored by a terrible summer of violence, electricity blackouts, and no movement at all on the political front---i.e., no government formed months after the last election. Here, one of the finest analysts in the region, Rami Khoury, gives a brief explanation. Juan Cole adds a comment as the speech Pres. Obama should give. (August 30, 2010)
Comment: America's 20 Years in Iraq
It was 20 yearts ago, in August 1990, when Saddam Hussein recklessly occupied Kuwait, which drew the U.S. deeply into the region and soon commenced a twenty-year period of war, sanctions, and occupation. How did this come to pass, and why? An analysis.
Afghan war leaks say much about Iraq, too
Wikileaks' revelations via classified documents about the nearly nine-year-old conflict in Afghanistan also reveals interesting information about the war in Iraq. Some 90,000 documents were released, and one of the periodicals to which these documents were given, The Guardian (London), ferreted out the relevant bits of "after action" reports. One particularly telling aspect was how routinely the U.S. military describes those killed -in-action as Taliban, when in fact many if not most are civilians. "U.S. and allied commanders frequently deny allegations of mass civilian casualties, claiming they are Taliban propaganda or ploys to get compensation, which are contradicted by facts known to the military," says one of its reports. "But the logs demonstrate how much of the contemporaneous US internal reporting of air strikes is simply false" (July 25, 2010). The extent of civilian casualties caused by U.S. actions and previously unreported in the news media likely reaches well into the hundreds and possibly thousands. Precisely the same dynamic was at work in Iraq, though at a much higher scale, according to former soldiers and marines who testified at the "Winter Soldier" hearings in 2008 and 2009.
CIVIC proposes new guidelines for civilian victims
In an atttempt to prod the U.S. Government to make "condolence" payments to victims of American wars fairer, a Washington-based NGO, Campaign for Innocent Victims of Conflict (CIVIC), proposes in a report that the U.S. military professionalize its entire approach to dealing with the victims. 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. "Civilian anger is often intensified by the current ad hoc claims system," say the authors, Marla Keenan and Jonathan Tracy, the latter a former judge advocate who served in Iraq. "Proactive investigation of civilian harm is a rarity rather than the norm," they note. And denial of claims can be routine: "Most convoy cases . . . resulted in denials and when based on the 'combat exception' were given no consideration for a condolence payment. That’s true even if it is shown that the victims did not posses ill intent toward the convoy or U.S. forces." The $2500 condolence payment, the typical maximum, was also characterized as too low. (June, 2010).
The continuing violence: Is the election to blame?
The failure to reach a political settlement in Iraq--the failure of the election process, one of the sine qua non conditions of "success"--is considered now the font of continuing and new violence. Middle East scholar Juan Cole has insightful commentary (May 10) on this here and (May 11) here. He estimates civilian deaths at 400 monthly, minimum, in this visible violence. The emerging coalition that may possibly govern--to be blessed by Shia Ayatollah Sistani--is likely to include U.S. nemesis Moktada al-Sadr, in itself a potential spur to increased violence. Moktada's supporters staged an enormous rally recently in Najaf and burned U.S. officials in effigy.
What the Wikileaks video says about the war
The infamous video released in early April by the investigative Web site Wikileaks, showing a U.S. helicopter gunship killing 12 apparently unthreatening Iraqis in Baghdad in July 2007, provides some fresh reminders about the war. 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. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates told the Los Angeles Times (April 14) that “these people can put out whatever they want and are never held accountable for it," said without apparent irony. Third, consider how the mainstram news media rallied round the soldiers: David Ignatius of the Washington Post called the video a "dangerous" example of “counter-embedding,” which he defined, “to embed with the insurgents and report what the war looked like from their side,” (May 2), and the New York Times ran a story on April 7, a few days after the video was released, discussing how traumatic such incidents are for the U.S. soldiers. 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.
Scars evident as Iraq marks 7th year of war
The seventh anniversary of the Iraq invasion and occupation largely passed with little comment in the U.S. press, and even its contested election--which could have profound consequences for human security--is garnering little attention. Concerns center on the charges of fraud that might undermine the shaky peace, and the Sadrists in particular have apparently gained an important foothold in parliament. The war's consequences continue to be felt, however. A lengthy article on psychological scars in USA Today notes "Iraq is just beginning to address the unseen battle wounds of paranoia, depression and anxiety rising out of the war that began with the U.S.-led invasion." A State Department report notes that electricity demand is 33% greater than supply, a chronic problem that affects sanitation, agriculture, and the commercial and industrial economy. And a major think tank assessment sees trouble for sectors like health and education for years to come.
New report on mortality stirs controversy
A new report from the Human Security Report Project at Simon Fraser University (Vancouver, Canada) makes a set controversial claims about why household surveys may overestimate mortality during war. The report uses the work of the International Rescue Committee in the Democratic Republic of Congo as its target, but the charge is relevant to the mortality study commissioned by the MIT Center for International Studies and published in The Lancet in October 2006, because the methods are virtually identical and one of the principal researchers involved in the Iraq studies, Les Roberts, headed the Congo studies. Two rebuttals to the Human Security Report were immediately issued,one from the IRC and the Burnet Institute, which cosponsored the surveys in the Congo, and one by Roberts. Both demonstrate technical as well as normative flaws in the report issued by Simon Fraser. Les Roberts, a professor at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University, replied with a letter and appendices: Read
Concerns with Iraq persist into 2010
While reports of civilian war deaths in 2009 were down to the lowest level since the U.S. invasion nearly seven years ago, they remain significant. Iraq Body Count, the U.K.-based NGO that uses press reports to count civilians killed by violence, had the number at just under 4,500 for 2009. This number, which does not count what the Multi-National Force labels as insurgents, nor security forces or deaths that result from war but not direct violence, misses whatever is not reported in what remains of English-language news media in Iraq. Even so, nearly 5,000 deaths are more than have been recorded for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in toto or for Northern Ireland's long conflict.
The fresh concerns have to do with the re-emergence of Sunni Arab violence in Anbar and continuing turmoil in Mosul and Kirkuk, much of which appears to be sectarian. Anxiety about U.S. withdrawal is also apparent. The numbers of displaced remain remarkably high. The acquittal by a U.S. judge of gunmen from Blackwater, the American security contractors who apparently murdered 17 civilians, angers Iraqis and has stirred the prime minister to an investigation. As a coalition of churches, Act Alliance, recently put it, "In 2009, the situation has improved, but remains volatile. . . A large majority of people is suffering direct consequences from war and sectarian violence. Poor sections of the population inside Iraq lack resources for decent lives. The majority of Iraqi refugees in Syria and Jordan are not yet set to return to their country, because of the instable political situation." Read the whole report.
BBC report: much Iraq violence goes unreported
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. 11). A medical doctor told her that there are explosions every day that are never reproted in the press. Read.
Study shows news media undercount violence
The peer-reviewed journal Conflict and Health published (November 2009) a study of the way the major news media are reporting casualty figures from the Iraq War, and note that "U.S. newspapers report more events and tallies related to Coalition [military] deaths than Iraqi civilian deaths, although there are substantially different proportions amongst the different U.S. newspapers. In four of the five non-US newspapers, the pattern was reversed." The authors conclude that "this difference in reporting trends may partly explain the discrepancy in how well people are informed about U.S. and Iraqi civilian fatalities in Iraq. 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." The authors, Schuyler W. Henderson, M.D., M.P.H., William E. Olander. M.P.H., and Les Roberts, Ph.D., are at Columbia University.
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.
Iraq's government rated among the world's most corrupt
The watchdog group Transparency International has ranked Iraq's government as the fourth most-corrupt in the world in its annual survey. It tied Sudan, and scored slightly higher than Myamar, Afghanistan, and Somalia. See the rankings here. The Berlin-based organization notes that the "results demonstrate that countries which are perceived as the most corrupt are also those plagued by long-standing conflicts, which have torn apart their governance infrastructure.
"When essential institutions are weak or non-existent, corruption spirals out of control and the plundering of public resources feeds insecurity and impunity. Corruption also makes normal a seeping loss of trust in the very institutions and nascent governments charged with ensuring survival and stability." Corruption of all kinds, but particularly that affecting conflict-riddled countries, makes human insecurity greater and robs the citizenry of development aid, economic growth, and security.
New violence, corruption threaten security
The massive bombings in August and October in Baghdad, killing hundreds, and ongoing violence in Mosul and Kirkuk are raising new concerns about progress made in Iraq. Among the sources of worry is pervasive and dangerous corruption in the security forces, as the New York Times reported in late October. Some of this violence may be related to the scheduled elections early next year, nation-wide elections that will shape the future of Iraq as U.S. force commitments wind down. Joost Hilterman of the International Crisis Group has an eyewitness report in the Nov. 19 issue of the New York Review of Books.
Fort Hood murders bring attention to suicides and reports of soldiers' violence
The shocking killings of 13 Americans at Ford Hood in early November raise again the psychological toll of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Among the issues being discussed is the extraordinary stress that the wars exact on service personnel. The suicide rate at Fort Hood is 10 soldiers per month, reports Asia Times, which also cites a RAND study last year noting that "nearly 20 percent of military service members who have returned from Iraq and Afghanistan — 300,000 in all — report symptoms of post traumatic stress disorder or major depression, yet only slightly more than half have sought treatment." This report from the New York Times (August 2, 2009) notes that the suicide rate among Iraq veterans is the highest for the army since records began to be kept.
As this site posted previously, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have exacted a toll on U.S. soldiers and their families and communities, as this recent investigation in Colorado illustrates. "Slaughter became a part of life," the report by Dave Phillips explains. "Discipline deteriorated. Soldiers say the torture and killing of Iraqi civilians lurked in the ranks. And when these soldiers came home to Colorado Springs suffering the emotional wounds of combat, soldiers say, some were ignored, some were neglected, some were thrown away and some were punished. Some kept killing — this time in Colorado Springs." Read the second part of the story. The concern among health professions about post traumatic stress disorder has grown, particularly as the suicide rate among Iraq veterans has also grown. See this medical analysis.
Gen. Odierno says attacks down 85% from peak; Red Cross warns violence still worrisome
General Ray Odierno, U.S. military commander in Iraq, said in congressional testimony at the end of September that attacks in Iraq were significantly down from 2007, enabling a steady pace of U.S. withdrawals that may in fact be quickened over the coming months. "Gen. Petraeus reported that there were over 230 monthly high profile attacks in Iraq in early 2007, a number now down to about 25 per month," reports MSNBC. What "high profile" means was not explained.
The Red Cross, however, warned against assuming that violence was no longer a problem. Nearly 400 died in August, according to official counts. "This is a real concern. Civilians are paying the high price of this violence in Iraq ... Sometimes there is the impression that life is going on as normal," said the head of the Red Cross in Iraq. Of particular concern is the upcoming national elections in January, and the contested cities in the north, particularly Kirkuk and Mosul, which have suffered increasing incidents in 2009.
Meanwhile, a medical crisis stemming from continuing violence festers, despite efforts to rebuild the nation's health care system, reports the Canadian Medical Association Journal. "Under-five mortality rates (46 per 1000) and maternal mortality rates (84 per 100 000) are far higher than in neighboring countries, and higher than they were before the invasion. One in eight deaths is violence-related. Roughly 38% of pregnant women are anemic. Diarrhoea and acute respiratory infections — further compounded by malnutrition — account for about two-thirds of deaths amongst the under-five population," says the report (Sept. 28, 2009). Two thousand physicians have been murdered since 2003, and 18,000 have fled--about half the prewar total.
The Iraqi human rights ministry said October 13th "that at least 85,000 people had been killed by bombs, murders and fighting in 2004-08," numbers collected via death certificates issued by the Ministry of Health. Another 10,000 people are missing from that period, the most violent of the war. Death certificates could be issued by other local agencies, and the Ministry of Health was under the control of the followers of Moktada al Sadr, the Shia militant, until late 2007, so the numbers are partial at best. The ministry noted, moreover, that 15,000 unidentified bodies were found in those four years, and that "thousands of Iraqis killed since 2003 without being identified by their relatives were buried in special cemeteries called unidentified body cemeteries." Even before the war, only one-third of all deaths were reported to or by the Ministry of Health. Under the stress of war and sectarian politics, the portion of reported deaths would likely be considerably lower.
USAID: Returnees gradually increasing, but numbers of displaced still in millions
Iraqis have beun to return to their places of (pre-2003) origin in 2009, says a Sept. 30 report from the U.S. Agency for International Development, but the total displaced from their homes in Iraq remains stubbornly high--4.5 million, with about 1.7 million, or 38%, as refugees mainly in Syria and Jordan. "Approximately 60 percent of total IDPs intend to return to areas of origin, but continue to cite security concerns, psychosocial reasons, and limited employment prospects as obstacles to return," the report explains. Some 325,000 displaced since early 2006 have returned, or 7 percent of the total.
"As of April 2009, more than 60 percent of the returnee population reported insufficient access to food, nearly 40 percent cited a lack of safe drinking water, and more than 50 percent noted inadequate quantities of fuel and other essential supplies upon returning home. In addition, many returnees are returning to find property destroyed or occupied." Read the report
Naming sexual violence in Iraq
Rape and other sexual violence is frequently a grisly aspect of war, not much talked about, and the war in Iraq is no different. "No one knows exactly how many Iraqi women have been raped since the U.S-led invasion in 2003, but activists in Iraq and abroad put the numbers in the thousands, writes ournalist Anna Badkhen. "Human rights groups began to see an increase in rapes in Iraq immediately after the fall of Hussein’s regime, and evidence that different factions were targeting women. In 2008, Amnesty International reported that 'crimes specifically aimed at women and girls, including rape, have been committed by members of Islamist armed groups, militias, Iraqi government forces, foreign soldiers within the U.S.-led Multinational Force, and staff of foreign private military security contractors.'"
Read Anna's report with the slide show and narration by Mimi Chakarova.
Scandal over Blackwater murders widening
The principal security contractor brought to Iraq by the Bush administration has been broadly implicated in murders of Iraqis and, allegedly, of some who would have testified about those killings. Blackwater, Inc., a notoriously violent corporation working with near-total immunity under the Bush military's rules of engagement, and its founder Erik Prince, are being targeted by federal investigators. Read more in The Nation.
First-hand reports say instability, violence persist
Violence in Iraq is again drawing some attention back to the country as considerations of U.S. deployment there are debated. As many predicted, the end to the subsidy of the "Awakening Councils" appears to be one source of new violence. Meanwhile, more eyewitness reports indicate how fragile the situation is. "We didn’t create a paradise in Iraq; we created a hell," journalist Nir Rosen told Amy Goodman in April. "It’s still pretty bad for most Iraqis, in terms of water, electricity. There are still explosions. . . . Prime Minister Maliki is creating kind of his own Republican Guard, an extralegal group of elite, thousands of soldiers. They act with impunity, above the law." See the interview. Rosen cites the recent Refugees International report on the displaced, which notes, that the refugees and internally displaced "remain reluctant to go back due to lack of security, the creation of ethnically cleansed neighborhoods, and poor government services." Read the report
The new low but significant levels of violence--as in Kirkuk and Mosul--are likely to persist. Baghdad and Basra are not immune either. Read Juan Cole's analysis of the debate (August 1).
ABC News poll in Iraq shows continuing civilian distress, opposition to U.S. invasion
An ABC News survey (March 2009) 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. As NGOs like Oxfam have reported, access to clean water, medical care, and other basic amentities exists for only 30-40% of the population. More than half believe the 2003 U.S. invasion was wrong, 70% believe the U.S. has "carried out responsibilities" badly during the war; and only 18 percent believe the U.S. is now playing a positive role in Iraq. One-quarter of all Iraqis, and much higher numbers of Arabs, said they witnessed "unnecessary violence" against Iraqis by U.S. forces recently.
Ethnic tensions persist: More than half of Sunnis say their lives are bad today; among Arabs, more than 40% still say insecurity is their major concern; dramatically growing numbers live in ethnically "pure" neighborhoods; and overwhelming percentages of Arabs oppose Kurdish control of Kirkuk.
The survey had a relatively low response rate, 62%, indicating that the responses they did receive do not reflect broader discontent, and Sunni populations appear to be under-represented, but neither ABC News nor D3 released all relevant sampling data. The data they did release and its analysis is here.
Iraq War widows in distress, says N.Y. Times, and number 740,000
"As the number of widows has swelled during six years of war, their presence on city streets begging for food or as potential recruits by insurgents has become a vexing symbol of the breakdown of Iraqi self-sufficiency," reports the New York Times (Feb. 23). "As the war has ground on, government and social service organizations say the women’s needs have come to exceed available help, posing a threat to the stability of the country’s tenuous social structures." There are some 740,000 war widows, the report says, including those from the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s and Desert Storm in 1991.
That is one of every eleven women from the age of 15 to 80. Given the population bulge in the 20-40 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 555,000 have been killed as a result of the U.S. invasion and subsequent violence. 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. Asecond report, by Oxfam, notes that 75% of widows are not getting pensions owed to them. Read more.
Claims of "victory" and the human cost in the Bush years
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 800,000 and 1.3 million. The analysis appears in The Nation (Feb. 16, 2009) and can also be read here. It has been translated into four languages and has appeared in more than 3,000 publications and on-line websites.
Reporter Tom Ricks adds that the war seems far from over. Read his commentary.
Iraq "reconstruction" a failure, says U.S. report; corruption probe widens
A New York Times investigation(February 15) finds that deep corruption of U.S. military officers in Iraq may be responsible for wasting tens of millions of dollars and taking bribes of $10 million. Some 35 Americans have already been convicted in the probe, which is now reaching up to higher levels in the U.S. army. "Several criminal cases over the past few years point to widespread corruption in the operation," says the investigation. Read more.
Separately, a comprehensive history of the U.S. experience in Iraq finds that the rebuilding effort was "crippled before the invasion by Pentagon planners who were hostile to the idea of rebuilding a foreign country, and then molded into a $100 billion failure by bureaucratic turf wars, spiraling violence and ignorance of the basic elements of Iraqi society and infrastructure." The report, by a special U.S. inspector general, depicts chaotic, incompetent management and partisan politics as undermining the more than $100 billion spent. At best, it concludes, the reconstruction will merely replace what the U.S. invasion destroyed in infrastructure. Read the report. The Dec. 14 New York Times story on the report is here.
New videos show the drama of human insecurity
Filmmakers are increasingly posting new videos of the plight of Iraqis and the conduct and consequences of the U.S. war. These accounts go well beyond conventional news sources, which have been downplaying news from Iraq and never covered the human cost adequately. Among the independent videos recently found is one from the "Winter Solider" conference (from the American News Project, which has several from Iraq); a treatment conveying the misery in Iraq in graphic imagery; an in-your-face rendition of U.S. operations challenging the usual narrative form; and one dissecting the "pre-jaded" soldiers and the cultural conditioning to be in combat.
Detention centers unchecked, says parliamentarian
Iraq's notorious detention centers---frequently a place of torture and disappearances---may be more numerous than previously thought. An Iraqi Member of Parliament, Mohammad Al-Dainy, has told the ICRC and others that the detention centers number 420. The State Department's human rights report on Iraq has charged the Interior Ministry, the overseer of the detention centers, with mutliple violations of human rights in those facilities. See the State Department's report. Human Rights Watch has also decried the situation, repeatedly, and has called on the Bush administration to take action. Some 17,000 Iraqis now in U.S. detention centers will be handed over to Iraqi authorities---possibly the Interior Ministry---in January, and concern for their safety runs high. A U.S. general says 12,000 of the 17,000 are essentially harmless and should be released.
Refugee policy a "failure" as displaced Iraqis fear returning home -- new reports
An October 2008 article from a Los Angeles Times correspondent reports that there is still a net outflow of professionally skilled Iraqis. This confirms earlier reports and analyses of the continuing refugee crisis.
(1) The millions of Iraqi refugees in the region "remain stranded, jobless and deprived of essential services, while the Iraqi government and the wider international community have failed in their responsibilities and are ill prepared to cope with a new refugee crisis, should it occur," says a new assessment from the International Crisis Group (July 10). Up to 5 million Iraqis have been displaced by the war. Two million or more are in Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria. Facing increasing poverty, says the report, and "with little to lose and nothing to look forward to, refugees could become radicalized and more violent; crime, which already has reached worrying levels in host countries, could rise. "
(2) The reduced violence in Iraq has not resulted in large-scale returns of refugees and internally displaced persons, because Iraqis do not regard their homeland as safe. This first-hand report by foreign correspondent Anna Badkhen (July 29) provides some insights on this lack of confidence in Iraq's security situation.
(3) A comprehensive analysis of the issue of Iraqi displaced and security from the Brookings Institution, The Looming Crisis: Displacement and Security in Iraq, released in August 2008.
(5) The International Organization for Immigration has been interviewing returnee families, 212 in all from abroad, and has this comprehensive report on who they are.
(6) Roberta Cohen provides a analytic overview of the displaced persons issue in the American University International Law Review , Autumn 2008.
"We were hiring terrorists": report on the Awakening militias
The quandary of what to do with the Sunni militias supported by the U.S. is becoming acute--the U.S. will stop payments to them this autumn, and the Iraqi government is unable or unwilling to absorb more than a handful into the police or army. As a result, tens of thousands of former insurgents will essentially be on the loose again, with arms and anger at the ready. Read journalist Anna Badkhen's eyewitness report.
New assessment shows gross under-reporting of war deaths
A worldwide survey of war deaths in 13 different countries from 1955 - 2002 shows that mortality accounts from "passive surveillance"--e.g., newspaper reporting--capture only one-third of actual deaths. The research, published in June in the British Medical Journal, thereby confirms that "active surveillance"--household surveys of the kind produced bythe Iraq Mortality Study--are more reliable. Read the article, and this report from the science journal Nature.
Polling analyst: Iraqis want U.S. troops out
In July 23 testimony before a U.S. House subcommittee, University of Maryland pollster Stephen Kull reviews the surveys done in Iraq that ask Iraqis about the U.S. occupation and potential troop withdrawal. "It is clear that the Iraqi people are quite eager for the US to lighten its military footprint in Iraq," Prof. Kull concluded. "More importantly, it appears that they are eager to regain their sense of sovereignty. As long as they do not have this sense, they are likely to continue to have a fundamentally hostile attitude toward all aspects of the US presence in Iraq." Read his testimony.
Report
The Human Cost of the War in Iraq: a Mortality Study 2002-06
Random killings, human bombs, dozens of violent groups, and a deepening sense of insecurity gnaw Iraq. The evidence of pervasive and persistent mayhem is everywhere, from the formal statistics of mortality to broader estimates of numerical outcomes. The deadly violence is omnipresent, but without a visible front or an apparent strategy—and for those reasons, among others, it is poorly understood.
It is for this reason that the mortality study conducted by Burnham et al was commissioned by the MIT Center for International Studies. Understanding the scale, the sources of violence, the demographical profiles of the victims, and the geographic dispersion of killing—all recorded in the household survey of the Iraq mortality study—provides an indispensable tool in coming to terms with the violence in Iraq. Read the full report in PDF
Other relevant commentary can be found at Cambridge Global
Eyewitness
An Iraqi Woman Regards the Human Cost of the War
Huda Ahmed is the Elizabeth Neuffer Fellow at the MIT Center for International Studies. She has worked as a journalist in her native Iraq, and is also now working at a public radio station in Boston. Read the report in English and Arabic 
"Inside Iraq" - Bloggers tell their stories
From the McClatchey News site, several Iraqis tell their unedited tales of life in a war zone. Highlighted in Michael Massing's articles (see Further Discussion). Link to the blogs
See also the N.Y. Times' Baghdad bureau blogs and videos here. Medea Benjamin's April 2008 blog on refugees in Syria and Jordan here.
