Tag Archive: peace not war


Civilian Death Toll In Iraq:
Video Footage Of A Civilian Massacre

Last month we had a think about the Iraqi and Afghani wars. According to the Stop The War Coalition newsletter, 8.5 billion as been spent so far on the Iraq war, whilst 12.5 billion has been poured into the Afghanistan occupation. We calculated this was the equivalent of £342. per UK citizen, A cheap holiday for each of us. https://suacs.wordpress.com/2010/03/05/stop-the-war-coalition-march-newsletter/ 

We asked our F/b group http://www.facebook.com/#!/group.php?gid=148659678647&ref=ts "What would you do with your £342?" We then investigated the human cost of the conflicts. After extensive research, we came to the conclusion that there were no reliable casualty figures for the Afghanistan war. There simply hasn't been the research.

With Iraq however, there has been several reliable studies with peer-reviewed results and transparent, published methodologies. One study was conducted by Harvard University and was published in the Lancet, the British Medical Association journal. Another was conducted by the University of Austin, Texas. We discovered two other studies with equally impeccable standards and lack of bias. All the studies came to the same shocking conclusion. The Iraq war had claimed the lives of 1:18 of the population, with, according to the UN, 1:5 of the survivors now 'displaced persons'. That's more than Pol Pot's death toll in Cambodia. It's more than Ide Armin's in 1970's Uganda. Its greater than the Ruwandan massacres of 1994.- And remember all these studies are at least a year old.  https://suacs.wordpress.com/2010/03/06/civilian-death-toll-in-iraq-and-afghanistan/  

WikiLeaks is an organisation that obtains secret information from governments around the world in order to publish it in the peoples' interest. Today it has released a classified US military video depicting the indiscriminate slaying of over a dozen people in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad- including two Reuters news staff. Reuters has been trying to obtain the video through the Freedom of Information Act, without success since the time of the attack. The video, shot from an Apache helicopter gun-site, clearly shows the unprovoked slaying of a wounded Reuters employee and his rescuers. Two young children involved in the rescue were also seriously wounded. The video is embedded below.

For related videos:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rXPrfnU3G0&feature=player_embedded#

March 1st

Civilian Death Toll In Iraq And Afghanistan

We at The Voice of Anti-Capitalism in Guildford were reading the Stop The War Coalition newsletter and wondering, what is the true civilian death toll in the wars of Iraq and Afghanistan.

By death toll we don’t just mean direct violent deaths. But all deaths, through disease and loss of infrastructure for example.  All ‘extra deaths’ over and above what the levels would have been, had there not been an invasion.  This is the true cost of the war in Iraq and Afghanistan.

We found no reliable data or studies into civilian deaths caused by the war in Afghanistan.

Regarding Iraq however, we found several surveys and estimates. These ranged from 1.2million deaths to 1.6million deaths. The pre war population of Iraq was 22.5million people. Amazingly then, using the most conservative figure, the  British and American governments have so far caused the deaths of between 1 /19 & 1/18 of the entire population.  Now that’s a sobering thought.

Click on the link below for tables and sources.
Civilian Deaths In Iraq