KABUL (Pajhwok): More than four million people have lost their lives in wars after the 9/11attacks on the United States, says a research-based report.
In the report released on Monday, Brown University researchers, , used UN data and expert analyses in determining the minimum number of excess deaths attributable to the war on terrorism.
According to the Washington Post, the study found the war on terrorism in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Somalia and Yemen had vast effects and the numbers there were unquantifiable.
The full death toll of violence in the US-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, let alone of the broader global war on terror, remains difficult to determine.
The indirect count of people killed as a result of post-9/11 conflicts’ far-reaching ripple effects, such as ensuing waves of violence, hunger, the devastation of public services and the spread of disease, the study said.
The accounting, so far as it can be measured, puts the toll at 4.5 million to 4.6 million — a figure that continues to mount as the effects of conflict reverberate.
Of those fatalities, the report estimates, some 3.6 million to 3.7 million were “‘indirect deaths” caused by the deterioration of economic, environmental, psychological and health conditions.
More than 7,000 US troops were killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, along with over 8,000 contractors, according to Brown’s Costs of War project.
It said the US forces have suffered cascading efforts of their own, including rates of suicide among veterans outpacing the general population.
More than 177,000 uniformed Afghans, Pakistanis, Iraqis and Syrian allies had died as of 2019, according to the Costs of War project, alongside a vast count of opposing combatants and a disputed civilian toll.
In Iraq, estimated casualties from fighting range between 151,000 and 300,000 to 600,000 people, the new report reckoned.
The Washington Post, among other outlets, has documented severe discrepancies and official undercounting of death tolls from the US-led coalition air and artillery strikes that targeted the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.
A Post investigation into casualty payouts in Afghanistan found the US military had an “uneven, typically opaque handling of the civilian toll of battlefield operations.”
Since 2010, a team of 50 scholars, legal experts, human rights practitioners and physicians participating in the Costs of War project have kept their own calculations.
Their latest assessment shows more than 906,000 people, including 387,000 civilians, died directly from post-9/11 wars. Another 38 million people have been displaced or made refugees.
The US federal government, meanwhile, has spent over $8 trillion on these wars, the research suggests.
“There are reverberating costs, the human cost of war, that people for the most part in the United States don’t really know enough about or think about,” said Stephanie Savell, the paper’s author and co-director of the Costs of War project.
“We talk about it being over now that the US has left Afghanistan, but one significant way that these wars are continuing,” she said, is that “the people in the war zones are continuing to suffer the consequences.”
But Savell said the research indicated that exponentially more people, especially children and the most impoverished populations, had been killed by the effects of war.
Mounting poverty, food insecurity, environmental contamination, the ongoing trauma of violence, and the destruction of health and public infrastructure, along with private property and means of livelihood were cited as major conflict effects.
Instead, Savell relied on a calculation by the Geneva Declaration Secretariat, a UN-backed initiative to address armed violence and development, which estimates that for every person directly killed by war, four more are killed by its indirect consequences.
War, which often brings about general economic collapse that pervades every aspect of society, compromises access to essentials such as water and food and the infrastructure needed for safe movement and medical care.
Determining whether deaths were intentional and who bears direct responsibility is outside the scope of the study, Savell said.
“You can’t separate out who caused the death because there are lots of different warring parties” and other complicating factors, from authoritarian rule to climate change, Savell said. “The point is to say the US has been involved in these really violent wars.
“There’s been intensification as a result of U.S. involvement. And at this point, the issue is really: How do we come to terms with a sense of responsibility?”
sa/mud
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