Please contact us to get started with full access to dossiers, forecasts, studies and international data. Skip to main content Try our corporate solution for free! Single Accounts Corporate Solutions Universities. 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. And given how often humanitarian rationales were invoked to defend aspects of the war on terror, it feels important to include the full humanitarian costs and the full humanitarian benefits in our accounting.
Some may object to including the latter deaths here on an equal footing with civilians and allied militaries. But failing to do so risks dramatically undercounting civilian deaths.
Obviously, not every adult male killed in the drone war was an opposition fighter. Then there are the costs in terms of people not killed but displaced by war. A paper released by the Costs of War Project last month estimates that Iraq produced 9. The authors estimate a total of 38 million displaced people, mostly in their own countries, as a result of US wars. There are indirect costs as well. To calculate the latter, they use a measure known as the value of a statistical life.
The idea is to use, for instance, the extra wages that workers in especially dangerous jobs demand to be paid to estimate how much the typical person is willing to pay to extend their life. More plausibly, the war on terror could be justified through, say, the far greater number of lives saved through aid to the Afghan health system. Here, too, though, the necessary number of lives saved needs to be enormous to justify the costs.
Times 20 means at least , lives saved. There were also gains with life expectancy for adults, reductions in maternal mortality. The figure of 25, deaths averted a year he cites is actually lower than the rough estimate of 44, I came to above on reduced child mortality. But even so, , total lives saved is likely an overestimate. The reduction in child mortality did not occur instantaneously between and ; it was gradual, meaning the gains, if they were the result of US actions, were only in effect for a fraction of the US occupation.
And doubling the lives saved estimate to 1 million, without a specific reason to think an equivalent number of lives were saved through reductions in non-child mortality, seems foolish. It is also important to think of the opportunity cost of the war.
That program, then and now, buys and distributes massive quantities of antiretroviral drugs to treat HIV and AIDS in developing countries, and promotes condom distribution and other prevention measures. It is truly one of George W. When you step back and think about the cost of the war on terror and all the possible benefits that could have come from it, you would be hard-pressed to arrive at a place where the benefits outstrip the costs.
Indeed, the former never comes remotely close to the latter. More than , civilians have been killed in the fighting since Millions of people living in the war zones have also been displaced by w ar. The U. The leading causes of civilian casualties in the first half of were the extensive use of improvised explosive devices IEDs by opposition forces, ground engagements between parties, targeted killings by non-state groups and airstrikes by the Afghan Air Force.
UNAMA said it was deeply concerned about these attacks which deliberately target civilians , including government workers, human rights defenders, media workers, religious elders, and humanitarian workers, and sectarian-motivated attacks. Children, it stated, were deliberately targeted on at least one occasion. The most shocking incident was the 8 May attack outside the Sayed ul-Shuhuda school in Kabul, which resulted in more than civilian casualties, mostly schoolgirls, including 85 killed, for which no group has claimed responsibility.
The UN mission said it was also concerned about the increasing number of reports of killing, ill-treatment, persecution and discrimination in communities affected by the fighting and its aftermath. It warned that all parties to respect the human rights and dignity of people and prevent such abuses and violations.
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