The New
Holocaust
August 28, 2017
Unworthy
Victims: Western Wars Have Killed Four Million Muslims Since 1990
By Nafeez Ahmed
April 08, 2015 "ICH" - "MEE" - Last month, the Washington DC-based Physicians for Social Responsibility (PRS) released a landmark studyconcluding that the death toll from 10 years of the “War on Terror” since the 9/11 attacks is at least 1.3 million, and could be as high as 2 million.
By Nafeez Ahmed
April 08, 2015 "ICH" - "MEE" - Last month, the Washington DC-based Physicians for Social Responsibility (PRS) released a landmark studyconcluding that the death toll from 10 years of the “War on Terror” since the 9/11 attacks is at least 1.3 million, and could be as high as 2 million.
The
97-page report by the Nobel Peace Prize-winning doctors’ group is the first to
tally up the total number of civilian casualties from US-led counter-terrorism
interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
The
PSR report is authored by an interdisciplinary team of leading public health
experts, including Dr. Robert Gould, director of health professional outreach
and education at the University of California San Francisco Medical Center, and
Professor Tim Takaro of the Faculty of Health Sciences at Simon Fraser
University.
Yet
it has been almost completely blacked out by the English-language media,
despite being the first effort by a world-leading public health organisation to
produce a scientifically robust calculation of the number of people killed by
the US-UK-led “war on terror”.
Mind
the gaps
The
PSR report is described by Dr Hans von Sponeck, former UN assistant
secretary-general, as “a significant contribution to narrowing the gap between
reliable estimates of victims of war, especially civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan
and Pakistan and tendentious, manipulated or even fraudulent accounts”.
The
report conducts a critical review of previous death toll estimates of “war on
terror” casualties. It is heavily critical of the figure most widely cited by
mainstream media as authoritative, namely, the Iraq Body Count (IBC) estimate
of 110,000 dead. That figure is derived from collating media reports of
civilian killings, but the PSR report identifies serious gaps and
methodological problems in this approach.
For
instance, although 40,000 corpses had been buried in Najaf since the launch of
the war, IBC recorded only 1,354 deaths in Najaf for the same period. That
example shows how wide the gap is between IBC’s Najaf figure and the actual
death toll – in this case, by a factor of over 30.
Such
gaps are replete throughout IBC’s database. In another instance, IBC recorded
just three airstrikes in a period in 2005, when the number of air attacks had
in fact increased from 25 to 120 that year. Again, the gap here is by a factor
of 40.
According
to the PSR study, the much-disputed Lancet study that estimated 655,000 Iraq
deaths up to 2006 (and over a million until today by extrapolation) was likely
to be far more accurate than IBC’s figures. In fact, the report confirms a
virtual consensus among epidemiologists on the reliability of the Lancet study.
Despite
some legitimate criticisms, the statistical methodology it applied is the
universally recognised standard to determine deaths from conflict zones, used
by international agencies and governments.
Politicised
denial
PSR
also reviewed the methodology and design of other studies showing a lower death
toll, such as a paper in the New England Journal of Medicine, which had a range
of serious limitations.
That
paper ignored the areas subject to the heaviest violence, namely Baghdad, Anbar
and Nineveh, relying on flawed IBC data to extrapolate for those regions. It
also imposed “politically-motivated restrictions” on collection and analysis of
the data - interviews were conducted by the Iraqi Ministry of Health, which was
“totally dependent on the occupying power” and had refused to release data on
Iraqi registered deaths under US pressure.
In
particular, PSR assessed the claims of Michael Spaget, John Sloboda and others
who questioned the Lancet study data collection methods as potentially
fraudulent. All such claims, PSR found, were spurious.
The
few “justified criticisms,” PSR concludes, “do not call into question the
results of the Lancet studies as a whole. These figures still represent the
best estimates that are currently available”. The Lancet findings are also
corroborated by the data from a new study in PLOS Medicine, finding 500,000
Iraqi deaths from the war. Overall, PSR concludes that the most likely number
for the civilian death toll in Iraq since 2003 to date is about 1 million.
To
this, the PSR study adds at least 220,000 in Afghanistan and 80,000 in
Pakistan, killed as the direct or indirect consequence of US-led war: a
“conservative” total of 1.3 million. The real figure could easily be “in excess
of 2 million”.
Yet
even the PSR study suffers from limitations. Firstly, the post-9/11 “war on
terror” was not new, but merely extended previous interventionist policies in
Iraq and Afghanistan.
Secondly,
the huge paucity of data on Afghanistan meant the PSR study probably
underestimated the Afghan death toll.
Iraq
The
war on Iraq did not begin in 2003, but in 1991 with the first Gulf War, which
was followed by the UN sanctions regime.
An
early PSR study by Beth Daponte, then a US government Census Bureau
demographer, found that Iraq deaths caused by the direct and indirect impact of
the first Gulf War amounted to around 200,000 Iraqis, mostly civilians. Meanwhile, her
internal government study was suppressed.
After
US-led forces pulled out, the war on Iraq continued in economic form through
the US-UK imposed UN sanctions regime, on the pretext of denying Saddam Hussein
the materials necessary to make weapons of mass destruction. Items banned from
Iraq under this rationale included a vast number of items needed for everyday
life.
Undisputed
UN figures show that 1.7 million Iraqi civilians died due to the West’s
brutal sanctions regime, half of whom were children.
The
mass death was seemingly intended. Among items banned by the UN sanctions were
chemicals and equipment essential for Iraq’s national water treatment system. A
secret US Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) document discovered by Professor
Thomas Nagy of the School of Business at George Washington University amounted,
he said, to “an early blueprint for genocide against the people of Iraq”.
In
his paper for
the Association of Genocide Scholars at the University of Manitoba, Professor
Nagi explained that the DIA document revealed “minute details of a fully
workable method to ‘fully degrade the water treatment system’ of an entire
nation” over a period of a decade. The sanctions policy would create “the
conditions for widespread disease, including full scale epidemics,” thus
“liquidating a significant portion of the population of Iraq”.
This
means that in Iraq alone, the US-led war from 1991 to 2003 killed 1.9 million
Iraqis; then from 2003 onwards around 1 million: totalling just under 3 million
Iraqis dead over two decades.
Afghanistan
In
Afghanistan, PSR’s estimate of overall casualties could also be very
conservative. Six months after the 2001 bombing campaign, The Guardian’s
Jonathan Steele revealed that anywhere between 1,300 and 8,000 Afghans
were killed directly, and as many as a further 50,000 people died avoidably as
an indirect result of the war.
In
his book, Body Count: Global Avoidable Mortality Since 1950 (2007),
Professor Gideon Polya applied the same methodology used by The Guardian to UN
Population Division annual mortality data to calculate plausible figures for
excess deaths. A retired biochemist at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Polya
concludes that total avoidable Afghan deaths since 2001 under ongoing war and
occupation-imposed deprivation amount to around 3 million people, about 900,000
of whom are infants under five.
Although
Professor Polya’s findings are not published in an academic journal, his
2007 Body Count study has been recommended by California State
University sociologist Professor Jacqueline Carrigan as “a data-rich profile of
the global mortality situation” in a review published by the Routledge journal, Socialism
and Democracy.
As
with Iraq, US intervention in Afghanistan began long before 9/11 in the form of
covert military, logistical and financial aid to the Taliban from around 1992
onwards. This US assistance propelled the Taliban’s violent conquest
of nearly 90 percent of Afghan territory.
In
a 2001 National Academy of Sciences report, Forced Migration and Mortality,
leading epidemiologist Steven Hansch, a director of Relief International, noted
that total excess mortality in Afghanistan due to the indirect impacts of war
through the 1990s could be anywhere between 200,000 and 2 million. The Soviet
Union, of course, also bore responsibility for its role in devastating civilian
infrastructure, thus paving the way for these deaths.
Altogether,
this suggests that the total Afghan death toll due to the direct and indirect
impacts of US-led intervention since the early nineties until now could be as
high 3-5 million.
Denial
According
to the figures explored here, total deaths from Western interventions in Iraq
and Afghanistan since the 1990s - from direct killings and the longer-term
impact of war-imposed deprivation - likely constitute around 4 million (2
million in Iraq from 1991-2003, plus 2 million from the “war on terror”), and
could be as high as 6-8 million people when accounting for higher avoidable
death estimates in Afghanistan.
Such
figures could well be too high, but will never know for sure. US and UK armed
forces, as a matter of policy, refuse to keep track of the civilian death toll
of military operations - they are an irrelevant inconvenience.
Due
to the severe lack of data in Iraq, almost complete non-existence of records in
Afghanistan, and the indifference of Western governments to civilian deaths, it
is literally impossible to determine the true extent of loss of life.
In
the absence of even the possibility of corroboration, these figures provide
plausible estimates based on applying standard statistical methodology to the
best, if scarce, evidence available. They give an indication of the scale of
the destruction, if not the precise detail.
Much
of this death has been justified in the context of fighting tyranny and
terrorism. Yet thanks to the silence of the wider media, most people have no
idea of the true scale of protracted terror wrought in their name by US and UK
tyranny in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Nafeez
Ahmed PhD is an investigative journalist, international security
scholar and bestselling author who tracks what he calls the 'crisis of
civilization.' He is a winner of the Project Censored Award for Outstanding
Investigative Journalism for his Guardian reporting on the intersection of
global ecological, energy and economic crises with regional geopolitics and
conflicts. He has also written for The Independent, Sydney Morning Herald,
The Age, The Scotsman, Foreign Policy, The Atlantic, Quartz, Prospect, New
Statesman, Le Monde diplomatique, New Internationalist. His work on the
root causes and covert operations linked to international terrorism officially
contributed to the 9/11 Commission and the 7/7 Coroner’s Inquest.
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Middle East Eye 2014 - all rights reserved
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