| Submit your comments on this article |
| Iraq-Jordan |
| Iraqi Death Toll down from Saddam's Regime |
| 2005-03-02 |
| March 2, 2005: Since Saddam Hussein and his Baath Party were removed from power in 2003, there have been about 1,300 deaths among the coalition forces, and between 20-25,000 for Iraqis. The Iraqi deaths include about 5,000 killed during the 2003 invasion. Of the remainder, about half are Sunni Arabs (most of them Iraqi, plus a few Shia Arabs) killed while fighting coalition forces as terrorists. Another five thousand or so are Iraqis killed by the terrorists, and the remainder are Iraqi civilians caught in the cross fire. The deaths among Iraqis is actually lower than when Saddam was in power. During his three decades of rule, Saddam killed half a million Kurds, and several hundred thousand Shia Arabs (and several thousand Sunni Arabs and Christian Arabs). During the 1990s, Saddam used access to food and medical care as a way to keep the Shia Arabs under control, but this process caused twenty thousand or more excess deaths a year (from disease and malnutrition). Foreign media, especially in Sunni Moslem nations, tend to play with these numbers. That is, they downplay the deaths inflicted by Saddam, inflate those that occurred during the 1990s and blame it on the UN, and greatly inflate the number of Iraqi civilians killed during coalition military operations. But Iraqis on the scene provide more accurate numbers, which are the ones presented here. A lot of the documentation for these stats will come out during the war crimes trials of Saddam and his key aides. |
| Posted by:Bobby |