Casualties in Iraq
The Human Cost of Occupation
Edited by Margaret Griffis :: Contact American Military Casualties in Iraq

Date Total In Combat

American Deaths
Since war began (3/19/03): 4079 3326
Since "Mission Accomplished" (5/1/03) (the list) 3940 3218
Since Capture of Saddam (12/13/03): 3618 3020
Since Handover (6/29/04): 3220 2693
Since Election (1/31/05): 2642 2430
American Wounded Official Estimated
Total Wounded: 30329 23000 - 100000
Latest Fatality May 18, 2008
Page last updated 05/18/08 7:59 pm EDT
Iraqi Casualties
US Military Deaths by Month from Icasualties.org
Put a Casualty Counter on Your Website
Others
Other Coalition Troops 312
US Military Deaths - Afghanistan 501
American Civilian Casualties
Sources: DoD, CentCom, MNF, and iCasualties.org

Daily DoD Casualty Release
320,000 Vets Have Brain Injuries
20,000 Vets' Brain Injuries Not Listed

The Faces The List Sources American Casualties Iraqi Casualties Contact

U.S. lacks mechanism to accurately track troops wounded in Iraq

A Running Log of the Wounded

UPI reports :

As many as 1 of every 10 soldiers from the war on terror evacuated to the Army's biggest hospital in Europe was sent there for mental problems.

Between 8 and 10 percent of nearly 12,000 soldiers from the war on terror, mostly from Iraq, treated at the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany had "psychiatric or behavioral health issues," according to the commander of the hospital, Col. Rhonda Cornum.

That means about 1,000 soldiers were evacuated for mental problems.

The hospital has treated 11,754 soldiers from the war on terror, with 9,651 from Iraq and the rest from Afghanistan, according to data released by the hospital.

Also see The Missing Wounded.

American Count

Dates and sources of Americans killed in Iraq since 5/1/03 are documented in this file. Admittedly the file is incomplete, for the Department of Defense does not maintain old records. All data was compiled from U.S. Department of Defense Official Website. If something is amiss in the data collection, please contact Margaret Griffis.

Iraqi Civilian Count

We maintain a daily count based on news reports. It is not intended to be complete. There is no agency that keeps track of accurate numbers of Iraqis killed. JustForeignPolicy maintains a running estimate based on the Lancet study with the rate of increase derived from the Iraq Body Count.


Sources and Links
Web page listing names of those killed since 5/1/03
Central Command Department of Defense Cost of War
BBC News Coalition Casualty Count The Washington Post
JustForeignPolicy Fox News BBC Figures



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without written permission is strictly prohibited.
Copyright 2008 Antiwar.com

I'm a licensed clinical social worker (psychotherapist) practicing on an inpatient psychiatric ward at a major army medical center. We treat OIF and OEF returnees, some airvaced from Landstuhl but others are flown directly to stateside hospitals bi-passing Germany. By far the majority of soldiers that are hospitalized due to trauma (PTSD not TBI) do so AFTER they return to CONUS when they find their wives having affairs, ready access to drugs and alcohol, boredom and time to think. Reported causality totals are estimates and actual numbers are probably higher. Totals fail to consider soldiers who committed homicides and suicides while in the states but only the ones who dies in country. Also causality figures do not count collateral causalities, those who are harmed by the returnees. Add to your totals the number of collateral casualties such as the death of a local civilian killed by recent returnees, intoxicated, adrenaline addicted, and PTSD dx, and racing down the interstate hwy. Another returnee, intoxicated, PTSD, rams the back of a broken down car being pushed off the road. Two legs required amputation. The wives often lose their only support system to long deployed husbands, become depressed and suicidal. Home life of returnees suffers. Anger problems result in divorces, child abuse, homicide, suicide and many turn to illegal and legal drugs to self medicate in an effort to cleanse their mind of the memories of what they witnessed and the atrocities of their actions. Some become homicidal and end up in prison. Some remain in their position without treatment and affect the workplace environment. Some of these untreated sick are commanders, law enforcement personnel, and regular soldiers, all with guns. Think of the effect they have on others, spouses, children, moms and dads, brothers and sisters. Add that to your total. Vicarious traumatization (PTSD) spreads mental illness from just listening to someone talk about trauma.
One soldier with PTSD reported that while in Iraq his Platoon Sergeant forced him to clean the wheel well on his humvee of the remains of a child that he earlier ran over while in a patrol convoy. Patrols are not allowed to stop for any reason for fear of an ambush. Or the soldier whose battle buddy was hit in the head by a dud rpg blowing off everything fom his brain stem up and watch him run around "like a chicken with his head cut off". Reading it is disturbing , hearing it is traumatic, seeing it is, well, I don't really know. That is 2 of the 100,000 plus figure but the ripple effect is far greater. The number whose lives have been scared by this war (so for) is probably over a million. That’s just USA. How many in Iraqi citizens with PTSD? Darfur?, UK?,

Thank you for your interest in keeping people informed of this war.

I appreciate these reports Elpaso, and suspect the human cost to be much greater than many will care to admit, or even consider honestly.

We should pull those poor bastards out tomorrow.

Even then, we will pay the costs for fifty years.

SUCCESS IN IRAQ: A MEDIA BLACKOUT
By RALPH PETERS

May 20, 2008 -- DO we still have troops in Iraq? Is there still a conflict over there?

If you rely on the so-called mainstream media, you may have difficulty answering those questions these days. As Iraqi and Coalition forces pile up one success after another, Iraq has magically vanished from the headlines.

Want a real "inconvenient truth?" Progress in Iraq is powerful and accelerating.

But that fact isn't helpful to elite media commissars and cadres determined to decide the presidential race over our heads. How dare our troops win? Even worse, Iraqi troops are winning. Daily.

You won't see that above the fold in The New York Times. And forget the Obama-intoxicated news networks - they've adopted his story line that the clock stopped back in 2003.

To be fair to the quit-Iraq-and-save-the-terrorists media, they have covered a few recent stories from Iraq:

* When a rogue US soldier used a Koran for target practice, journalists pulled out all the stops to turn it into "Abu Ghraib, The Sequel."

Unforgivably, the Army handled the situation well. The "atrocity" didn't get the traction the whorespondents hoped for.

* When a battered, bleeding al Qaeda managed to set off a few bombs targeting Sunni Arabs who'd turned against terror, that, too, received delighted media play.

* As long as Baghdad-based journalists could hope that the joint US-Iraqi move into Sadr City would end disastrously, we were treated to a brief flurry of headlines.

* A few weeks back, we heard about another Iraqi company - 100 or so men - who declined to fight. The story was just delicious, as far as the media were concerned.

Then tragedy struck: As in Basra the month before, absent-without-leave (and hiding in Iran) Muqtada al Sadr quit under pressure from Iraqi and US troops. The missile and mortar attacks on the Green Zone stopped. There's peace in the streets.

Today, Iraqi soldiers, not militia thugs, patrol the lanes of Sadr City, where waste has replaced roadside bombs as the greatest danger to careless footsteps. US advisers and troops support the effort, but Iraq's government has taken another giant step forward in establishing law and order.

My fellow Americans, have you read or seen a single interview with any of the millions of Iraqis in Sadr City or Basra who are thrilled that the gangster militias are gone from their neighborhoods?

Didn't think so. The basic mission of the American media between now and November is to convince you, the voter, that Iraq's still a hopeless mess.

Meanwhile, they've performed yet another amazing magic trick - making Kurdistan disappear.

Remember the Kurds? Our allies in northern Iraq? When last sighted, they were living in peace and building a robust economy with regular elections, burgeoning universities and municipal services that worked.

After Israel, the most livable, decent place in the greater Middle East is Iraqi Kurdistan. Wouldn't want that news getting out.

If the Kurds would only start slaughtering their neighbors and bombing Coalition troops, they might get some attention. Unfortunately, there are no US or allied combat units in Kurdistan for Kurds to bomb. They weren't needed. And (benighted people that they are) the Kurds are pro-American - despite the virulent anti-Kurdish prejudices prevalent in our Saudi-smooching State Department.

Developments just keep getting grimmer for the MoveOn.org fan base in the media. Iraq's Sunni Arabs, who had supported al Qaeda and homegrown insurgents, now support their government and welcome US troops. And, in southern Iraq, the Iranians lost their bid for control to Iraq's government.

Bury those stories on Page 36.

Our troops deserve better. The Iraqis deserve better. You deserve better. The forces of freedom are winning.

Here in the Land of the Free, of course, freedom of the press means the freedom to boycott good news from Iraq. But the truth does have a way of coming out.

The surge worked. Incontestably. Iraqis grew disenchanted with extremism. Our military performed magnificently. More and more Iraqis have stepped up to fight for their own country. The Iraqi economy's taking off. And, for all its faults, the Iraqi legislature has accomplished far more than our own lobbyist-run Congress over the last 18 months.

When Iraq seemed destined to become a huge American embarrassment, our media couldn't get enough of it. Now that Iraq looks like a success in the making, there's a virtual news blackout.

Of course, the front pages need copy. So you can read all you want about the heroic efforts of the Chinese People's Army in the wake of the earthquake.

Tells you all you really need to know about our media: American soldiers bad, Red Chinese troops good.

Is Jane Fonda on her way to the earthquake zone yet?

Ralph Peters' new book, "Looking For Trouble: Adventures in a Broken World," hits stores on July 4.

Too bad FoxNews can't manage to get all the glorious Truth out there...

What with all it's devoted viewers.

The vast majority of those "poor bastard" including THIS "poor bastard" supports the mission.

__________________
The American people will never knowingly adopt Socialism. But under the name of liberalism they will adopt every fragment of the Socialist program, until one day America will be a Socialist nation, without knowing how it happened.

Norman Thomas

You must have missed my link detailing the fact that FOX News has been number for 77 consecutive months.

THE QUIT-IRAQ TIME-TRAVELERS
By RALPH PETERS
May 29, 2008

WHENEVER retreat-now activists or their favored presidential aspirant are confronted with our progress in Iraq, their stock reply is, "Al Qaeda wasn't in Iraq in 2003."

Well, I happen to agree with Sen. Barack Obama and his supporters on that count: At most, the terrorists had a tenuous connection with Saddam's regime. But it's 2008, not 2003. And our next president will take office in 2009. It's today's reality that matters.

It's as if, in June 1944, critics had argued from facts frozen in June 1939. ("Why invade Normandy? Hitler's content with Czechoslovakia.")

In the course of a war - any war - the situation changes, enemies evolve and goals shift. A war to preserve the Union becomes a war to end slavery; a war to defeat one set of totalitarian systems empowers a new network of tyrannies. It's a rare war whose end can be forecast neatly at its outset.

And you don't get any do-overs.

To date, not one "mainstream media" journalist has pressed the leading advocates of unconditional surrender to describe in detail what might happen after we "bring the troops home now."

There's plenty of unchallenged sloganeering, but no serious debate. This selective political softball and pep-rally journalism serves neither our country nor our political process well.

So, let's bring those quit-Iraq time-travelers back to mid-2008 and fill them in on what's happened since they were ideologically stranded five years ago:

* After our troops reached Baghdad, al Qaeda's leaders made a colossal strategic miscalculation and publicly declared that Iraq was now the central front in their jihad against us. Matter of record, in the enemy's own words.

* Some Iraqi Sunni Arabs, lamenting the national pre-eminence they'd lost, rallied to the terrorists.

* Al Qaeda in Iraq and its affiliates then embarked on a campaign of widespread atrocities: videotaped beheadings, mass bombings of civilians, assassinations, widespread rape (of boys and girls, as well as of women), kidnappings and brutal efforts to dictate the intimate details of Iraqi lives.

* Al Qaeda's savagery alienated the Sunni Arab masses in record time. Suddenly, those American "occupiers" looked like saviors.

* By the millions, Sunni Muslims turned against al Qaeda and turned to the US military, inflicting a catastrophic propaganda defeat on the terrorists.

* Supported by the population, US and Iraqi forces inflicted a massive military defeat on al Qaeda. At present, the terror organization's own Web masters admit that al Qaeda is nearing final collapse in Iraq.

Those are facts.

If we nonetheless quit Iraq in 2009, the defeated remnants of al Qaeda will be able to declare victory, after all. The organization will be able to re-launch itself as the great Muslim victor over the Great Satan. We'll have thrown away a potentially decisive triumph and revived the fortunes of the fanatics who brought us 9/11.

And the above only detailed the defeat of al Qaeda. Far more is happening in Iraq, all of it good: Muqtada al-Sadr and his thugs have suffered a series of lopsided defeats; Muqtada's hiding in Iran, afraid to return; a democratically elected government has finally taken charge in Baghdad - and gained enormously in popularity.

Iraqis look forward to the next round of elections (to the dismay of every Persian Gulf autocracy). Crucial legislation has been refined, passed and implemented. Iraq's economy is booming - and its government has begun paying its own way.

Want more good news? Iran has failed in its bid to take control of Iraq. And our military leaders are drawing down our troop levels according to a sensible plan, with the prospect of more troop cuts to come.

What don't the critics like? Democracy? The defeat of al Qaeda? Muslims turning to the US military for help? Troop cuts? The dramatically improved human-rights situation? What's the problem here?

The answer's simple: Admitting that they've been mistaken about Iraq guts the left's argument for political entitlement. If the otherwise deplorable Bush administration somehow got this one right, it means the left got another big one wrong.

So be prepared for frequent time-machine trips until November. The encouraging reality of today's Iraq will go ignored in favor of an endless mantra of "Al Qaeda wasn't there in 2003 . . ."

The bottom line? Al Qaeda let the war's opponents down.

Ralph Peters' new book, "Looking For Trouble: Adventures in a Broken World," hits stores on July 4.

Al-Qaida on ropes: Bin Laden is losing
New Hampshire Post Editorial


CIA Director Michael Hayden said last week that al-Qaida is losing its war on the West. Skeptics who don't trust any information that emerges from the lips of a Bush administration official do not have to take Hayden's word to believe the truth of his assessment. The evidence is everywhere.

In a Washington Post interview last week, Hayden presented our successes in the War on Terror this way: "Near strategic defeat of al-Qaida in Iraq. Near strategic defeat for al-Qaida in Saudi Arabia. Significant setbacks for al-Qaida globally -- and here I'm going to use the word 'ideologically' -- as a lot of the Islamic world pushes back on their form of Islam."

That might sound like Bush administration puffery. But days earlier, two New York University researchers wrote a strikingly similar appraisal in the liberal magazine The New Republic.

"According to Pew polls, support for Al Qaeda has been dropping around the Muslim world in recent years," wrote Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank. "The numbers supporting suicide bombings in Indonesia, Lebanon, and Bangladesh, for instance, have dropped by half or more in the last five years. In Saudi Arabia, only 10 percent now have a favorable view of Al Qaeda, according to a December poll by Terror Free Tomorrow, a Washington-based think tank. Following a wave of suicide attacks in Pakistan in the past year, support for suicide operations amongst Pakistanis has dropped to 9 percent (it was 33 percent five years ago), while favorable views of bin Laden in the North West Frontier Province of Pakistan, around where he is believed to be hiding, have plummeted to 4 percent from 70 percent since August 2007."

On Thursday U.S. commanders announced that Iraq's Diyala province, once a stronghold for al-Qaida in Iraq, was under U.S. and Iraqi control.

On May 24 U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker said al-Qaida in Iraq was closer to defeat than it has ever been. In mid-May, terrorist attacks in Iraq fell to their lowest level since March 2004.

The evidence worldwide strongly suggests that al-Qaida has been decimated by a combination of aggressive action by the United States and its allies and the terrorist organization's own horrific acts. Not only are ordinary Muslims turning against terrorism in droves, but former al-Qaida supporters and trainees have taken to denouncing the group for murdering innocents, especially Muslim ones.

Still, Hayden cautions against complacency.

"The fact that we have kept [Americans] safe for pushing seven years now has got them back into the state of mind where 'safe' is normal," he said. "Our view is: Safe is hard-won, every 24 hours."

That's a good way to look at this war, which President Bush said from the start would be long and arduous. It isn't over yet, but the evidence shows that so far we are doing better than the enemy.

Number One?

Too bad they are prevented by the libtard Media from spreading all the good news, que no?

Wowsa has stated emphaticly that al qeada in Iraq has been eliminated, and that glorious, western-style democracy is now a reality there.


FoxNews should announce our Great American Victory over terrorism, and be done with it...