Some shocking statistics from the Iraqi government on the impact of the US-led invasion on the country:
1. One million widowed Iraqi women (according to Iraqi Ministry of Women Affairs).
2. Four million orphaned Iraqi children (according to estimates by the Iraqi Ministry of Planning).
3. Two and a half million (2,500,000) Iraqis killed (according to the Iraqi Ministry of Health and Forensic Medicine).
4. 800,000 Iraqis have disappeared in secret holding places connected with the different ruling parties (according to registered complaints at the Iraqi Ministry of the Interior).
The numbers of Iraqis killed since or due to the 2003 invasion became part of the political football over the Iraq invasion in the UK and US, especially due to the ‘controversial’ Lancet studies. I am sceptical of headline figures like ‘1 million killed’ that have been extracted from numerous studies (anti-war campaigners did a disservice to the studies with such abuse of the work). The emphasis of the studies was to show if the invasion of Iraq had made things better or worse; the general conclusion was that things had become a lot worse. I don’t know how robust the figures cited above are, but they can only add to the general sense the Iraq invasion was a disaster.
