On 20 March 2003, the US, the UK and Australia (with Poland) invaded Iraq, bringing death and destruction on a horrendous scale. Twenty years on, as the invading coalition now set their sights on the next war, an examination of the legacy left to the Iraqi people is instructive.
As with all wars, the tip of the iceberg of the suffering inflicted on Iraq is measured in mortality. Estimates of the numbers who died, from both direct and indirect causes, vary widely from hundreds of thousands to one million (see, for example, here and here).
The wide variation is attributable to a multitude of factors including the difficulty of collecting data in war-ravaged communities, and the method of data collection.
There is even greater uncertainty around the extent of life-long and debilitating physical and psychological injuries, but it far exceeds the number of those who died.
Health system collapse
Within weeks of the invasion, the International Committee of the Red Cross reported that ‘the medical system in Baghdad has virtually collapsed’.
By July 2003, UNICEF reported that more than 1,000 Iraqi children had been killed or wounded by abandoned weapons and munitions. Less than a year after the invasion, The Independent newspaper reported that at Baghdad’s main children’s hospital ‘the wards are filthy, the sanitation shocking, the infections lethal’, and that ‘sewage drips from the roof above cots of premature babies.’
This was a country whose healthcare system had already been devastated by a decade of crippling economic sanctions, imposed largely by the coalition that then invaded.
There were floods of forced displacements, a human tragedy in themselves but almost a given with modern warfare.
As of 2021, an estimated 9.2 million Iraqis were internally displaced or refugees abroad. This exacerbated the appalling healthcare situation, as health care and other professionals formed part of the exodus.
By 2007 it was estimated that 40 per cent of the middle class had fled, prompted in part by a breakdown of law and order, and that at least 2,000 Iraqi doctors were reported killed and 250 kidnapped.
Attacks on healthcare facilities, while absolutely forbidden under the rules of war, have also become a part of the landscape of modern wars.
Human rights abuses were committed by the occupying forces (for example reported allegations by US military veterans and revelations about Abu Ghraib prison), and yet it is journalist Julian Assange – who published evidence of war crimes committed in Iraq –languishing in prison in the UK.
Not a single political leader has been held accountable for the war or its conduct.