The Impact of the Iraq War on Civilians: Statistics and Stories

Most writing about the cost of this war to civilians is writing about how many died. That is the easiest thing to count and it is not the biggest thing that happened to people.

Start with the deaths, briefly

Estimates range from around two hundred thousand documented civilian deaths to survey-based figures several times higher. The spread comes from method rather than dishonesty, and the counting page explains why.

Whatever figure you use, it is a floor for the wider impact rather than a summary of it. Each death also produced a household without an income, children out of school and a family that in many cases had to move.

A floor, not a summary

Whatever figure you use, it is the floor for the wider impact rather than a description of it. Each death also produced a household without an income, children out of school, and in many cases a family that had to move.

Displacement, the largest single effect

Millions of Iraqis were displaced during the war, either inside the country or as refugees abroad, with the peak during the sectarian violence of 2006 and 2007.

In Baghdad this took a specific form. Mixed neighbourhoods separated by sect, sometimes street by street, under threat. Families who had lived somewhere for generations left in a week. Some have never returned.

• The house is only the first loss.
• The network goes too: the neighbour who lends, the shop that gives credit, the school a child is enrolled in.
• Rebuilding takes years, and for many families it never happened.

Electricity, water and hospitals

The people who left

One of the most damaging effects is also the least visible. Doctors, engineers, academics and other professionals were targeted, kidnapped and killed, and a very large number left the country.

That kind of loss compounds. A hospital without senior doctors trains no junior ones. A university without professors produces no graduates. The effect of that decade is still being felt in Iraqi institutions, long after the electricity came back.

Why individual stories still matter

Figures in the hundreds of thousands do not produce understanding, they produce numbness. That is a well-known limit and it is why this archive spends so much of its space on a handful of people.

One family from this record shows the shape of it. A man was driving his two children somewhere, saw a wounded stranger in the road, and stopped. He was killed. His children were badly hurt and survived, and grew up in the same district without him.

Nothing about that is unusual for Iraq between 2003 and 2011. It is unusual only in being recorded.

The part that outlasted the war

Several effects did not end when the troops left, and they are the ones least often counted.

Unexploded ordnance and contamination remain a hazard in parts of the country, particularly for children and for farmers. A generation that lost years of schooling entered adult life without qualifications. Households that lost a working adult never recovered the income. And the psychological cost, in a country with almost no mental health provision, was absorbed privately by families who had no other option.

None of this appears in a casualty figure, and none of it has a date attached. It is what people mean when they say a war continues after it ends.

What the statistics hold and what the stories lose

The leaked field reports added roughly fifteen thousand deaths to the documented record, which was a real gain for the historical account and tells you how much was missing before.

For the men killed in the street on 12 July 2007, most have no names in any English-language source. They exist as a range between eight and twelve. Each one had a household of the kind described above, and none of them is countable in the way this page has been counting. That gap is the truest measure of what a war does to civilians: not only the people it kills, but the ones it makes unrecordable. The names this archive does hold are here.