According to the research, the operations have indirectly killed millions more due to destruction of economies, public services, infrastructure, and the environment, which adds to the death toll long after bombs are dropped and increases over time.
Many long-term and under-appreciated consequences of war that was need to be studied in more detail.
The research indicates that the direct war fatalities or killing of nearly one million people is an undercount “precise mortality figure remains unknown”.
The estimates of war deaths in Iraq have been particularly controversial. A 2006 article in The Lancet estimated that approximately 600,000 Iraqis had died due to war violence between 2003 and 2006.
The controversy over the conflicting reports on the death toll in Iraq stems from news outlets that are opposed to the war, who overplayed the death toll, while those who supported the illegal invasion downplayed the death toll.
There have been various unbiased studies that concluded more than one million Iraqis have been killed as a result of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq from 2003 to 2011.
The Iraqi deaths can be considered an undercount because of almost daily bombings that killed hundreds of Iraqis. Add to the era of the US and Daesh from 2014 to 2017 where hundreds of thousands of others were slaughtered and it’s not difficult to imagine more than one million Iraqis have died and continue to die today as a result of the US war on terror.
There
is little doubt that the US has brought nothing but insecurity and instability
to West Asia, with its military presence. In January 2018, the Leader of Iran's
Islamic Revolution, Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei said,
"America's corrupting presence in this region should end… In this region, they brought war, discord, sedition, destruction, destruction of infrastructure. Of course, wherever they stepped in the world, they acted the same way... this must end."
The report put special emphasis on the effects of US wars on women and children who suffer the brunt of these ongoing impacts the most.
The report notes that while people were killed in fighting, far more, especially children, have been killed by the reverberating effects of US wars, such as the spread of disease and damage to public services.
"More studies are necessary on the impact of war’s destruction of public services, especially beyond the healthcare system, on population health," the report says.
"Damage to water and sanitation systems, roads, and commercial infrastructure such as ports, for instance, have significant but less understood consequences."
The research says wars and conflicts which the US has waged or been engaged in under the pretext of countering terrorism since September 11, 2001 makes clear that the impacts of war's ongoing violence are so vast and complex that they are unquantifiable.
It should be noted that after the September 11 attacks, the US waged wars and sparked conflicts, especially in West Asia under the pretext of fighting terrorism. However, as a result of the US military adventurism, there has been an extremely sharp rise in terrorist groups that had no presence in West Asia or countries such as Somalia before Washington’s intervention in the region.
In other words, war on terror has had the complete opposite effect of the slogan under which the Pentagon waged a campaign of instability in West Asia that allowed terrorism to flourish.
Millions of people are still in distress, pain and traumatized in both current and former warzones, the study says, calling on the US as well as its allies to alleviate the ongoing losses and suffering of millions of people and provide the required reparations, though not easy or cheap. This is something imperative, the report points out.
The report focuses on Afghanistan as an example of how people, in particular women and children, the most vulnerable in society, are dying because, despite the US (shambolic) withdrawal, the damage Washington inflicted on Afghanistan’s vital services, such as the health sector and the damage the US caused to the country’s sanitation and other infrastructure in the 20 years of war and occupation means Afghans are still dying today.
"Though in 2021 the United States withdrew military forces from Afghanistan, officially ending a war that began with its invasion 20 years’ prior, today Afghans are suffering and dying from war-related causes at higher rates than ever," the report alarmingly points out.
In the case of Somalia for example, US intervention and the war that followed has prevented the delivery of humanitarian aid, which the research says exacerbated famine; this is a natural disaster that could have been alleviated if the US instead chose to spend a vast amount of money in humanitarian assistance programs and not radicalizing the local population (and increasing terrorism and bloodshed) by bombing civilians with drones in the sky.
Critics argue that if the United States had not waged war against countries in West Asia or provoked conflicts in the region, then other parties would not have engaged in any combat missions. In this case, the US must be solely held responsible for the disturbing direct and indirect death toll as a result of its provocative and illegal military measures.
