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| The war in Iraq claimed more than 116,000 civilian lives in the space of eight years and cost the US about £530 billion, according to new research. |
By David Blair
A study in “The
Lancet”, a specialist medical journal, lays bare the price of the
Anglo-American invasion that began 10 years ago.
From the moment
that the first air strikes took place on March 19 2003, Iraqi civilians
began to die.
By the time the
last US soldiers left in December 2011, “at least 116,903 Iraqi non-combatants”
had been killed, according to Barry Levy and Victor Sidel, two American
professors of public health from Tufts University and the Albert Einstein
College of Medicine respectively.
Many Iraqi
civilians were injured or became ill because of damage to the health-supporting
infrastructure of the country
In addition,
4,487 American and 179 British troops were also killed.
This calculation
of civilian fatalities is significantly lower than other estimates. In 2006,
“The Lancet” published a study comparing Iraq’s population growth rates before
and after the invasion. This concluded that 655,000 “excess deaths” had taken
place since the war began in 2003. However, the methodology of that survey was
widely criticised.
Iraq Body Count,
a website that totals the reported number of dead in each incident, has reached
a similar conclusion to the latest study. It currently places the number of
civilian deaths at between 111,687 and 122,108.
As for the
financial cost, the new study makes conservative assumptions, omitting the
interest payments on the higher US national debt caused by the Iraq war.
If those are
included, the bill could eventually reach £2 trillion.
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