Posted on March 4, 2008 in Articles

Interesting Statistical Comparisons

Every 9.74 days, there is an equivalent amount of casualties in Iraq & Afghanistan as September 11th.

There are 9.53 Virginia Tech shootings in Iraq & Afghanistan every day.

There is on average 305 daily civilian deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq.

In 14 days, as many Iraqi and Afghani civilians are killed as the entire amount of American military personnel killed since the invasion of Afghanistan in 2002 and the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Note: There is some discrepancy between various sources on the amount of civilian casualties since the US-led invasion in Iraq and Afghanistan. A study in October of 2006 listed over 650,000 killed (see Washington Post article below) while other sources vary from over 1 million to just over 80,000 (see British-government funded Iraq Body Count below). I computed 400,000 Iraqi civilian fatalities and 45,000 Afghani civilian fatalities by averaging several sources, though I personally feel these are conservative estimates.

Update: The differing methodologies among these studies led to these wide variations. For example, the lowest figure from IBC is based solely on media reports of violent deaths, while the Lancet study surveyed random families in Iraq and includes non-violent war related deaths, such as those dead to lawlessness and collapsed infrastructure.

Raw Data: 400,000 Iraqi Civilian Deaths, 45,000 Afghani Deaths, 4,208 US Deaths in Iraq (3,972 of which are US armed forces and 236 private contractors), 415 US Deaths in Afghanistan, and 2,974 September 11th Deaths.

Sources: Deadly Hubris: A million Iraqis dead — for what? By Justin Raimondo. http://www.tehrantimes.com/index_View.asp?code=163051

How Many Iraqis Have Really Died? By Diane Farsetta. http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/77992

Forgotten victims by Jonathan Steele, the Guardian. http://www.guardian.co.uk/afghanistan/comment/story/0,11447,718647,00.html

September 2007 – More than 1,000,000 Iraqis murdered. Opinion Research Business, http://www.opinion.co.uk/Newsroom_details.aspx?NewsId=78.

Civilian Casualties in Afghanistan, Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualties_of_the_U.S._invasion_of_Afghanistan

Casualties of the Iraq War, Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_conflict_in_Iraq_since_2003

Casualties in Iraq: The Human Cost of Occupation, Antiwar. http://www.antiwar.com/casualties/

Study Claims Iraq’s ‘Excess’ Death Toll Has Reached 655,000 by David Brown, Washington Post. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/10/AR2006101001442.html

Iraq Body Count, http://www.iraqbodycount.org/.

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Related on PBH: Civilian Death Statistics in Afghanistan and Iraq

See Also: Iraqi civilian casualties rose 36 percent in February, Rescuing Our Iraqi Friends, Citizenship Applications From Veterans Backlogged, Progress: In the Slums of Fallujah, It’s The Iraq Top Torture Tune Rundown!, The War for the Surge, Afghan Poppy Production – Another Boom Year, Secrets and Lies, An inconvenient AFG truth, Moral Dilemma, Political Expedience, US Soldier Throws Puppy Off Cliff, and Speaking Of Iraqi Justice...

[tags]iraqi civilians, september 11, 9/11, civilian casualties, innocent, graphs, afghanistan, total fatalities, data, afghani, us military, army, invasion, middle east[/tags]