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MOD figures reveal one thousand British casualties in Iraq to date

Friend | 12.09.2005 08:04 | Analysis | Anti-militarism | World

British forces have suffered approximately one thousand casualties since the invasion of Iraq and the total is likely to keep increasing as the conflict intensifies.

With the sad news of two more deaths of British soldiers earlier last week and another yesterday, it may be time to ask again about the true cost of the Iraq war - this time to the British people. A simple answer is available you might think, but actually it is next to impossible to find the true number of British casualties.

The reason is that the government and Ministry of Defense , unlike their American counterparts, do not willingly issue any information on the large number of wounded UK personel. These hidden casualties include people who have lost limbs and had their lives permanently shattered but, because they survived, their loss receives no public recognition.

The large discrepancy between published and actual casualties became clear to me at the start of this year when I, along with others, wrote to the MOD to request information under the new freedom of information act.

The reply from the MOD revealed that while 85 fatalities had occurred by that time, 790 other troops had been seriously wounded. They would not provide information on the extent of the injuries or even how they received them so some doubt remains. However, these were people who had to be evacuated form Iraq as a result of their condition so one has to assume that they were seriously hurt.

The wounded to dead ratio for the British forces during the Iraq conflict of 9.3 is similar to that for the US. A study in the New England Journal of Medicine from December last year revealed that for every 10 US casualties only one died, despite the lethality of the weapons employed. They comment that:

"Though firepower has increased, lethality has decreased. In World War II, 30 percent of the Americans injured in combat died. In Vietnam, the proportion dropped to 24 percent. In the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, about 10 percent of those injured have died. At least as many U.S. soldiers have been injured in combat in this war as in the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, or the first five years of the Vietnam conflict, from 1961 through 1965. This can no longer be described as a small or contained conflict. But a far larger proportion of soldiers are surviving their injuries. Because of the improvements in medical practice soldiers are surviving injures in the Iraq war that would of killed them in Vietnam or even other more recent conflicts. The high ratio of wounded to dead is largely accounted for by these advises in technology and proactie, but, this results in people surviving with horrific disabilities including multiple limb losses and other impairments."

While such a study has not been performed in the UK one can assume that the situation is similar even though UK troops have not been involved in the sort of intense urban conflict that the US has under taken in Falluja and elsewhere.

Therefore, it is probable that the true UK casualty situation is as follows:

- From the invasion in March 2003 to January 10th 2005, MOD figures tell us that there were at least 875 casualties of which 85 died and 790 were seriously injured.

- Since that date we know that eleven more soldiers have died have been killed. Based on the previous ratio we can estimate that 102 troops have also been seriously wounded giving a total for the period of 113 and a overall estimated figure for total casualties since the war began of 988.

Why is it that the UK government, unlike the Americans, refuse to issue the full casualty figures for British forces serving in Iraq? And why does the mainstream media allow the perpetuation of this distortion of the real situation?

An obvious reason is that if the true casualty figures were circulated the British public would gain quite a different picture of the ongoing conflict, the extent of our involvement in the fighting, the somewhat cozy image that we have of the British role in the Iraq operation. While such a position may provide some, unfortunately, false comfort to the families of those serving in Iraq, it fails to acknowledge the full price being paid by our young men and women and the full cost to our armed forces of Mr Blair's decision to join the US led invasion. With violence increasing in Southern Iraq as the insurgency becomes more active in the area, it is likely that the direct involvement of British troops and the resulting casualty toll will increase still further.

Friend
- Homepage: http://craigmurrayfriends.blogspot.com/

Comments

Hide the following 3 comments

Real wounded not Hollywood wounded

12.09.2005 15:27

Generations brought up with decades of Hollywood bo**ocks about people being hit by a bullet or shrapnel scrambling into cover, lighting a cigarette one-handed then binding the wound before charging bravely out to defeat the bad guys need to be informed that people whose bodies meet up with a bullet at 4000 feet a second have a few seconds of shock before screaming their heads off in agony. In general, wounded particularly, by a bomb explosion doesn't mean a picturesque Hollywood wound in the arm or leg, wounded means arms, legs and gonads off, eyes out, faces smashed in and major brain damage.

Similarly, being shot and killed doesn't mean instantaneous death either despite more of Hollywood's nonsense. What happens is you get shot, roll around alternately screaming and crying for your mother[by an odd peculiarity unmarried men call out for their mothers and married men cry out for their wives] for hours and THEN die. It's not much fun. As a distinguished ex soldier rather chillingly put it in an article "If you're going to be shot and killed you'd have to be incredibly lucky for death to be instantaneous".

It was bloody awful that working class kids from Britain, the US and the Soviet Union had to suffer like this in their thousands to defeat Hitler but for our poor bloody economic conscripts to suffer this kind for a pair of gutless sh**bags like Bush and Blair, Halliburton and the neocons in Texas defies belief.

Dave W
ex-army (I was young and stupid and didn't know any better)

Dave Watt


Fuck 'em.

13.09.2005 23:11

Yes fuck 'em. They were quite prepared to go and kill Iraqis so stop this pathetic bleating about 'poor working-class kids'.

dave


grow up Dave!

14.09.2005 10:12

many of them probably just wanted a job and a place to belong. Iraq is wrong but not everything the Army does/has done is. Now go back to the Student Union for another tax subsidised pint!

Arthur


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