An article published recently in The Nation and on Alternet provides a good overview of the Iraq war’s high human toll. Let us hope that advisors for President Obama, who promised to end this costly war, will see and take heed of this article. One way to encourage that is to send copies of the article to them.
Iraq’s Shocking Human Toll: About 1 Million Killed, 4.5 Million Displaced, 1-2 Million Widows, 5 Million Orphans
By John Tirman
The Nation, Feb 2 2009
We are now able to estimate the number of Iraqis who have died in the war instigated by the Bush administration. …
… [T]he United Nations estimates that there are about 4.5 million displaced Iraqis — more than half of them refugees — or about one in every six citizens. Only 5 percent have chosen to return to their homes over the past year, a period of reduced violence from the high levels of 2005-07. … According to Unicef, many provinces report that less than 40 percent of households have access to clean water. More than 40 percent of children in Basra, and more than 70 percent in Baghdad, cannot attend school.
The mortality caused by the war is also high. Several household surveys were conducted between 2004 and 2007. … The higher of those found 650,000 “excess deaths” …; the other yielded 400,000. The war remained ferocious for twelve to fifteen months after those surveys were finished and then began to subside. … So we have, at present, between 800,000 and 1.3 million “excess deaths” as we approach the six-year anniversary of this war.
… The overall figures are stunning: 4.5 million displaced, 1-2 million widows, 5 million orphans, about 1 million dead — in one way or another, affecting nearly one in two Iraqis.
By any sensible measure, it would be difficult to describe this as a victory of any kind. It speaks volumes about the repair work we must do for Iraqis, and it should caution us against the savage wars we are prone to. …
February 17, 2009 at 1:44 am |
The damage is clear, but Tirman’s numbers puzzle me: If 1 million are killed and some are women and children, and some must be single men, how might there be “1-2 Million Widows?” Are we seeing some artifact of Islamic law? Or are the numbers just poor estimates?
February 17, 2009 at 5:16 pm |
I heard on NPR today that there are possibly as many as 3 million widows in Iraq. However, they did not all lose their husbands in the current Iraq war. Many were widowed in the war with Iran in the 1980s, the U.S. led Gulf war of 1990, and civil fighting during Saddam Hussein’s reign.
February 18, 2009 at 8:20 pm |
A friend also pointed out that many Iraqi men have multiple wiives. So if one Iraqi man dies, that may result in more than one widow.