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The War in Iraq: Enemy
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The Civilian Death Toll in Iraq
by James Dunnigan
March 7, 2005
Discussion Board on this DLS topic
Since Saddam Hussein and his Baath Party were removed from power in 2003, there
have been about 1,300 deaths among the coalition forces, and between 20-25,000
for Iraqis. The Iraqi deaths include about 5,000 killed during the 2003
invasion. Of the remainder, about half are Sunni Arabs (most of them Iraqi, plus
a few Shia Arabs) killed while fighting coalition forces as terrorists. Another
five thousand or so are Iraqis killed by the terrorists, and the remainder are
Iraqi civilians caught in the cross fire. The deaths among Iraqis is actually
lower than when Saddam was in power. During his three decades of rule, Saddam
killed half a million Kurds, and several hundred thousand Shia Arabs (and
several thousand Sunni Arabs and Christian Arabs). During the 1990s, Saddam used
access to food and medical care as a way to keep the Shia Arabs under control,
but this process caused twenty thousand or more excess deaths a year (from
disease and malnutrition). Foreign media, especially in Sunni Moslem nations,
tend to play with these numbers. That is, they downplay the deaths inflicted by
Saddam, inflate those that occurred during the 1990s and blame it on the UN, and
greatly inflate the number of Iraqi civilians killed during coalition military
operations. But Iraqis on the scene provide more accurate numbers, which are the
ones presented here. A lot of the documentation for these stats will come out
during the war crimes trials of Saddam and his key aides.
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The Perfect Soldier: Special Operations, Commandos, and the Future of Us Warfare by James F. Dunnigan
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