More Iraqi civilians were killed in the last month than were killed in the attack on the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. Nearly 3,000 people died in the September 11 attack.
In Iraq, 3,149 civilians were killed in June 2006, an average of more than 100 per day. Nearly the same number was
killed in May, according to a report issued by the United Nations.
The number of Iraqi civilians killed has risen each month of 2006. In the last six months alone, Iraqi civilian casualties numbered 14,338. Most were killed by U.S.-led coalition forces or their proxies in Iraq’s military establishment and its allied militias.
Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have died as a result of the criminal war of aggression launched by the U.S. and British governments in March 2003. A study published in November 2004 in The Lancet, an esteemed British medical journal, put the death toll at over 100,000. That was 20 months ago. The actual number was likely much higher, but the researchers used a conservative method of calculating deaths. The Lancet reported that most of the deaths were caused by direct violence and most of the violent deaths were inflicted by U.S. and British forces.
Iraq has 27 million people. It is less than one-tenth the size of the United States in population. How can people in the United States, thousands of miles away from Iraq, comprehend the catastrophic impact of the U.S. war and occupation?
Try this: think of yourself sitting at home three years ago or watching your children play in the backyard when bombs and missiles suddenly shattered your world. It would be the day that a foreign power decided that “your” president, George W. Bush, possessing weapons of mass destruction and indicating a desire to threaten war against other countries, had to be replaced with its choice for a new government. To that end, the foreign power started dropping tens of thousands of bombs on your city and other cities and towns throughout the United States.
Hundreds of thousands of foreign troops raced through your town, shooting anything that moved during a three week period. Then they occupied your country and killed anyone who demanded that the occupying forces leave. Magnify the number of deaths in Iraq by a factor of ten—remember the United States is ten times larger in population than Iraq. That would mean far more than one million deaths. And more than a million families living with the loss of a loved one caused by a war of aggression by foreign invaders.
There is only one way to stop the civilian deaths in Iraq—end the colonial occupation now!
