Epilogue: Iraq and Its Casualties Today

Abstract

The book covers the 2003-2017 period, but what has happened in Iraq since 2017? After nearly two decades of war, Iraq has experienced its least violent year; seventeen years after the invasion, during 2019 2,392 civilian deaths were recorded by Iraq Body Count. In its worst year, 2006, Iraq had witnessed the violent deaths of more than 29,500 civilians. The monthly and yearly totals, assembled after the painstaking daily task of extracting the data from hundreds of reports, betray the true magnitude and impact of the war on Iraqi civilians. The controversy surrounding the precise figures, the counts, or the estimates ultimately leads to the realisation that we do not need for millions to have been killed for the world to be outraged by the catastrophic impact of the War on Terror on the Iraqis. The number of certain civilian deaths that has been documented to a basic standard of corroboration by passive surveillance methods, in an ongoing war and through ongoing casualty recording, provides enough evidence to deem this invasion and occupation a security failure.