Welcome
This site explores an aspect of the war in Iraq that has been largely ignored - the human cost of the war for Iraqis.
Conventional wisdom in American politics focuses only on American casualties even then, only military losses, and discounts or ignores the scale of suffering of the Iraqi people themselves. The MIT Center for International Studies commissioned a mortality study in 2006 that sought to understand the violence specifically. We also include on this site other resources and studies of human insecurity in Iraq. John Tirman, Executive Director, MIT Center for International Studies
Recent
Iraq: The Bottom Line on Falling Casualties
The media have focused heavily of late on the significant fall in U.S. military and Iraqi military and civilian casualties. This is a very welcome development which cannot be denied. Nonetheless, too much discussion has focused on whether casualties actually have fallen (they have) instead of how durable the trend is likely to be. Read more
U.S. must face huge death toll of Iraqi civilians
An Associated Press poll in February found that the average American believed about 9,900 Iraqis had been killed since the end of major combat operations in 2003. Recent evidence suggests that things in Iraq may be 100 times worse than Americans realize. Read more
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
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 
