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Runaway1956 [soylentnews.org] writes:

January 4, 2016

Fourteen years ago, after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center, the United States government initiated its “war on terror,” with the invasions of Afghanistan in 2001, which expanded into Pakistan, and of Iraq in 2003. The conventional methodology of American politics emphasizes American financial, strategic, and human costs. Since then, the corporate media has occasionally acknowledged the 6,800 American soldiers, and the 7,000 contractors who died in Iraq and Afghanistan. However, corporate media and the American government have consistently ignored Iraqi and Afghani deaths, which exceed one million. Without acknowledging this modern “reign of terror,” the western public has no context to understand the current attacks lead by the Islamic State in Syria and Levant (ISIL).

Civilian casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan are about ten times greater than the number the British-based Iraq Body Count (IBC) reports. IBC statistics are not reliable because they are chiefly collected from media reports written in English. Considering the majority of Iraqi media sources are written in Arabic, IBC coverage excludes a high percentage of civilian deaths. The US corporate media, including CNN and Fox News, relies on IBC numbers.

A study authored by the Nobel Peace Prize Laureate International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, along with the Physicians for Social Responsibility, and the Physicians for Global Survival, “conservatively, estimates that at least 1.3 million people have been killed in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan from direct and indirect consequences of the U.S. ‘war on terrorism’,” wrote Al Jazeera’s Lauren Carasik. Moreover, over one million lives were lost in Iraq alone, about 5 percent of the country’s population. The report also describes the three million “internally displaced” Iraqis and approximately 2.5 million Afghan refugees living in Pakistan.

http://www.projectcensored.org/14-years-of-censored-news-coverage-denies-americans-context-to-understand-isil-attacks/ [projectcensored.org]

NOTE: There is a short list of references on the page which are worth looking at. Especially, see the MIT reference, which helps to explain why such studies are difficult and/or unreliable. http://web.mit.edu/humancostiraq/ [mit.edu]

DISCLAIMER: I heard the claim, about five years ago, that we have caused more than a million deaths in Iraq alone - which I believed to be ludicrous. This claim, five years later, is more believable, as it includes three nations in which we have been active in. I'm not quite believing it at face value, but it is within the realm of possibility.

Original Submission