No one knows with certainty how many people have been killed and wounded in Iraq since the United States invasion. However, we know that between , and , civilians have died from direct war related violence caused by the U. The violent deaths of Iraqi civilians have occurred through aerial bombing, shelling, gunshots, suicide attacks, and fires started by bombing.
Efforts are now underway to restore the marshes. Human Rights Watch calls the campaign against the Marsh Arabs a crime against humanity and other rights activists call it genocide.
There are claims chemical weapons also were used. In August of , Saddam ordered the Iraqi military, the fourth largest military in the world at the time, to invade Kuwait, leading to the Gulf War.
Iraqi soldiers are accused of torturing and executing hundreds of Kuwaitis, as well as taking hostages and looting. More than oil wells were set on fire and pipelines opened, spilling oil into the Gulf. After heeding President George H. Bush's call to rebel against Saddam, Shiites and Kurds were crushed by immense Iraqi military force. Saddam turned his military against the people as part of his widespread crackdown after the war.
The rebels thought they would have the backing of the U. Thousands have been discovered in mass graves. Ayatollah Muhammed al-Sadr, father of prominent Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, and two of his sons were assassinated in Al-Sadr was a well-liked Shiite leader, and his death spawned Shiite uprisings in Baghdad. As he had previously, Saddam cracked down on the rebellion and hundreds were killed. Army war logs released by Wikileaks in pointed to more than ,, while a widely criticized study conducted by Opinion Research Business , a London-based polling agency, estimated Iraq war deaths at 1.
Heads of households were asked about family deaths, and household members were asked about sibling deaths stretching back decades. President George Bush suggesting that only about 30, Iraqi civilians had died in the conflict. Roberts agreed with Hagopian that the household survey estimate is likely conservative, because it relied on the imperfect recollections of household members and largely missed the 1. Overall, the survey results point to Baghdad as the epicenter of violent deaths during the war.
Coalition forces were blamed for 35 percent of the killings, followed by militias at 32 percent. The report showed that warfare was particularly intense in , followed by a sharp drop in Sadly, the violence continues, notes Salman Rawaf , director of the World Health Organization Collaborating Centre for Public Health Education and Training, in a written commentary accompanying the survey.
About 5, Iraqis have died in bombings and shootings this year, according to estimates by the French press agency, AFP. The return of sectarian violence means "living in Iraq today is no longer about how many have died, but how future deaths should be prevented," says Rawaf. All rights reserved. Follow Dan Vergano on Twitter. Share Tweet Email. Read This Next Wild parakeets have taken a liking to London. Animals Wild Cities Wild parakeets have taken a liking to London Love them or hate them, there's no denying their growing numbers have added an explosion of color to the city's streets.
But he shares Hicks's doubts. Several of the most important comments centre on the lack of detail in the report about the precise methodology and the protocols that were adopted by interviewers in a highly volatile and tense situation," he says.
The most detailed criticism has appeared in a long study in the January issue of the National Journal, a right-of-centre magazine aimed at Washington policy-makers. It raised three sets of questions: possible flaws in the study's design and execution; a "lack of transparency in the data which has raised suspicions of fraud"; and political preferences held by the authors and the funders, who include George Soros's Open Society Institute.
The National Journal described the Baltimore study's Iraqi field director, Riyadh Lafta, as "a child-health official in Saddam Hussein's ministry of health when the ministry was trying to end international sanctions against Iraq". They say he claimed high rates of child malnutrition during the sanctions period without giving data from the pre-sanctions period by which they could be measured.
They allege he and his interviewers for the Baltimore study worked "under brutal political pressure" at a time when the health ministry was under the control of Moqtada al-Sadr, the anti-occupation Shia religious leader. They say Lafta had little supervision and has rarely appeared in public or been interviewed. He presented his study to an off-the-record meeting of experts in Geneva last May but none of the attendees has agreed to describe his remarks.
He refused to respond to emailed questions from the National Journal. The Baltimore study's authors have declined to provide the interviewers' reports and questionnaires, a non-transparency issue which also worries the IBC researchers. Responding to the criticism that it was impossible to visit so many homes in a day, the researchers said in earlier Guardian interviews that most visits were terminated after the first question - if the household did not register any deaths.
In a long reply to the National Journal recently released on their website www. He has frequently worked with other international groups since and "asked that he not be contacted by the media out of concern for his safety and that of his family, a not unreasonable request in Iraq where doctors and academics are major assassination targets".
On the alleged speed of the interviewers' work, the Baltimore people say most houses were in walled compounds and doorstep interviews were "judged to be the best survey techniques from the point of security and cultural acceptability".
They say the interviewers' data with names and addresses cannot be released for fear of endangering the families. As for the funders' political views, they say this is irrelevant since the interviewers were not told who the funders were. Finally, they point out that more recent data confirm their findings and even suggest a higher figure. Using the census total of 4,, households in Iraq, this suggests 1,, deaths since the invasion.
Accounting for a standard margin of error, ORB says, "We believe the range is a minimum of , to a maximum of 1,, Frederick "Skip" Burkle is a professor in the department of public health and epidemiology at Harvard University who ran Iraq's ministry of health after the war but was sacked by the US and replaced by a Bush loyalist.
He says the survey ignored the occupation's indirect or secondary casualties - deaths caused by the destruction of health services, unemployment and lack of electricity. Two surveys by non-government organisations found a rise in infant mortality and malnutrition, he notes, so why are those figures not reflected in the second study that appeared in the Lancet? The controversy will clearly run and run, probably long after the Iraq war eventually ends. One thing is certain, and it provides no comfort for Bush, Blair and other occupation supporters.
They continue to claim that, whatever errors may have been committed since the invasion, the judgment of history will be that the toppling of a brutal dictatorship was an unmitigated benefit.
That alone means the invasion was a blessing for the people of Iraq. Alas for Bush and Blair, most statisticians do not support their case. Nor can any journalist or other independent witness who has seen the pain of the bereaved still living in post-invasion Iraq or the millions who have escaped to Jordan and Syria. Estimates of the Iraqi deaths caused by Saddam's regime amount to a maximum of one million over a year period , Kurds in the Anfal campaign in the s; , in the war against Iran; , Shias in the suppressed uprising of ; and an unknown number executed in his prisons and torture chambers.
Averaged over his time in power, the annual rate does not exceed 29, Only the conservatively calculated Iraq Body Count death toll credits the occupation with an average annual rate that is less than that - some 18, deaths in the five years so far.
Every other source, from the WHO to the surveys of Iraqi households, puts the average well above the Saddam-era figure. Those who claim Saddam's toppling made life safer for Iraqis have a lot of explaining to do. Monday March 10 - 34 dead Including Dr Khalid Nasir, the only neurosurgeon in Basra; sheikh Thair Ibrahim and his five-year-old niece, killed by a female suicide bomber; 10 people killed by a suicide bomber; and a mother and son killed by gunmen.
Tuesday March 11 - 90 dead Including a couple kidnapped the week before; 16 members of a family returning from a funeral, killed by a roadside bomb; three killed in a US air strike; and 20 people whose bodies were found in a mass grave. Wednesday March 12 - 24 dead Including a year-old girl killed by US forces; five shot and beheaded at a checkpoint; and three truck drivers killed in a roadside bomb.
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