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Estimating the Casualties of the First Gulf War

Old Blog Import

March 6, 1992: The Washington Post reports that the U.S. Census Bureau demographer assigned to estimate the number of Iraqis killed during the Gulf War will be fired. Beth Osborne Daponte estimates that 86,000 men, 40,000 women and 32,000 children died at the hands of American-led coalition forces, during the domestic rebellions that followed and from postwar deprivation. After various protests, the Bureau rescinds the firing but rewrites the report, lowering the death toll and removing the data on women and children. The following month, the Pentagon published its three-volume official history of the war, but a draft chapter on casualties is deleted and there is no mention of Iraqi deaths. (The London Independent, April 23, 1992).”

History News Network

According to the methods described in this paper, the number of Iraqis who died in 1991 from effects of the Gulf war or postwar turmoil approximates 205,500. There were relatively few deaths (approximately 56,000 to military personnel and 3,500 to civilians) from direct war effects. Postwar violence accounted for approximately 35,000 deaths. The largest component of deaths in this reconstruction derives from the 111,000 attributable to postwar adverse health effects. Of the total excess deaths in the Iraqi population, approximately 109,000 were to men, 23,000 to women, 74,000 to children”

Medicine & Global Survival

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