US ‘war on terror’ cost millions of lives, reveals new report
How many deaths is the United States responsible for in the 21st century? According to new research, millions of people.
How Death Outlives War, a paper published by the Watson Institute at Brown University, an Ivy league college in Rhode Island, estimates the direct and indirect number of deaths caused by the twenty-year war on terror. “The total death toll in the post-9/11 war zones of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen could be at least 4.5-4.6 million and counting”, its authors write.
United States President Joe Biden withdrew American troops from Afghanistan in August 2021 as his administration made a final shift away from the war on terror, which caused misery across the Middle East, to focus on starting a new war in Asia.
But the millions of people ensnared in the post-9/11 carnage cannot move on. Their livelihoods have been destroyed by Western intervention in the Middle East. Their families have been maimed and killed. The war on terror brought imperialist violence into people’s backyards. Villages and cities were plundered; in many instances they were reduced to rubble.
The destruction of infrastructure and the associated economic collapses have led to acute food insecurity in some places. In 2022, 95 percent of Afghans were not getting enough to eat. And with malnutrition, unsanitary conditions and inadequate healthcare comes disease—children in Iraq and Afghanistan suffer inordinately high rates of cholera, diarrhoea, typhoid and measles.
Fallujah, a city bombarded and doused with chemical weapons during the Iraq War, has been wrecked by environmental contamination. The exposure to uranium in the weapons used by the Americans “increased rates of infant mortality, leukaemia, and cancer”, according to the report.
Doctors have told women in Fallujah to avoid conceiving because “they could not bear healthy children ... and the attempt to do so was killing them”. The full extent of the environmental contamination will be felt for some time as children continue to be born with defects and higher chances of developing cancer.
Unexploded ordinances pollute the Middle East. At least 3-5 percent of bombs dropped by the US did not detonate when they hit the ground, and nobody came to safely clean them up. Civilians are forced to live with this constant danger. A 2021 UN report found that 160 people were killed each month by unexploded weapons in Afghanistan alone—79 percent were thought to be children. The estimate does not account for the people who have been seriously injured by these deadly leftovers.
The post-9/11 wars displaced 38 million people from their homes, uprooting them from family and friends, and replacing one form of dangerous insecurity with another. Refugees spread across the Middle East and Asia struggle to access safe shelter, food, water and healthcare. More than 80 percent of Afghan refugees in Pakistan said their greatest needs were for “shelter, livelihoods and food”.
The war on terror has left the countries it terrorised in a hideous state of poverty and insecurity.
The inhumane consequences of the wars expose the brutal motives of the West. It was not a benevolent battle to liberate the oppressed people of Iraq and Afghanistan, but a vain attempt at strengthening Western influence in the region, no matter the cost.
The post-9/11 wars in the Middle East and Central Asia have been a tragedy for the people of the region, and some of them are still being fought. But those who are responsible for starting the wars are not wasting time crying over the lives they destroyed. They are too busy telling everyone to get ready for the next war.
