War and Conflict in the Middle East and North Africa. Ariel I. Ahram
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1.6 Internationalized civil wars, MENA v. the world
Source: Peace Research Institute, Oslo/Uppsala Conflict Data Project, data available at https://www.prio.org/Data/Armed-Conflict/UCDP-PRIO/; Gleditsch et al., “Armed Conflict 1946–2001: A New Dataset.”
Price, Anita Gohdes, and Patrick Ball of the Human Rights Data Analysis group, “the chaos and fear that surround conflict mean that killings often go unreported and consequently remain hidden from view.”19 Reliable data become the scarcest in the areas most afflicted by violence. Moreover, because these techniques rely on third-party reporting via media or crowdsourcing, they tend to highlight violence in more densely populated urban settings while undercounting violence committed in remote rural areas.20 While there are more data than ever on battle deaths, these data are often disparate and contradictory.
The Iraq War was a case in point. The United States refused to release data on civilian deaths in Iraq, and it is unclear whether it even collected such information. American and British military officials declared that they “don’t do body counts.”21 President George W. Bush stated that “30,000 [Iraqi civilians], more or less, have died as a result of the initial incursion and the ongoing violence.” Aides later clarified that this was not an official statistic, but an estimate based on published news accounts. Other organizations offered substantially different figures. In August 2006, the NGO Iraqi Body Count (IBC) estimated that number at between 47,016 and 52,142. The Brookings Institution, a US think tank, estimated the number at 62,000.22
But wars do not kill just by guns and bombs. They also damage the institutions necessary to assure access to basic needs like food, healthcare, and sanitation. They level economies and impel displaced populations and refugees.23 During World War I, for example, combat largely spared Lebanon and Syria. Nevertheless, Ottoman military and labor conscription and their requisitioning of crops, timber, and fuels led to severe shortages for the civilians in the area and left millions vulnerable to hunger. Historians estimate that between 100,000 and 200,000 may have succumbed to starvation or disease and tens of thousands were displaced.24
The Yemeni civil war of the 2010s offers a more recent example. Blockades and direct strikes on food distribution centers, sanitation facilities, and hospitals have contributed to mass hunger and precipitous declines in public health, including a massive cholera outbreak.25 UN officials called this “the worst humanitarian crisis of our time.” An estimated three-quarters of the Yemeni population require food assistance and 1.8 million children suffer from acute malnourishment.26
Theories of human security insist on accounting for these indirect effects, even though collecting data on them is practically very daunting. During the Iraq War, the British medical journal The Lancet published a series of studies conducted by epidemiologists between 2003 and 2006. Deploying techniques commonly used to estimate death tolls from earthquakes and other natural disasters, investigators randomly sampled neighborhoods to conduct door-to-door surveys. They asked residents about anyone who had died in the previous year and the cause of death. The researchers then extrapolated to calculate how many Iraqis had died between 2003 and 2006 and compared that result to the period prior to the invasion. They concluded that Iraq’s mortality rate had shot up from 5.5 deaths per 1,000 people annually before the invasion to 13.3 per 1,000 people after. Thus, they attributed 654,965 additional Iraqi deaths to the war, including 601,027 deaths due to violence (mostly by gunfire).27 But the studies faced immediate criticism and accusation of political bias. In 2016 and 2017, Iraqi researchers used a sampling method that was similar to but more comprehensive than The Lancet studies. They calculated battle deaths at 155,000, higher but still in line with the previous IBC and Brookings studies. On the most substantive issue, they concurred with The Lancet, finding that overall mortality had nearly doubled during the war.28 The disparities in calculating the magnitude of war in part reflect differences in methodology and in the rigor of application. They also represent varying understandings of the mechanisms by which wars cause harm.
Thinking in terms of magnitude adds an important dimension to the comparative study of war in MENA. The Arab–Israeli wars, for instance, stand out as a relatively uncommon case of interstate war in the developing world. The United States and other great powers granted these wars a great deal of attention. Nobel Peace Prizes were awarded to those who sought to end the conflict. However, in terms of magnitude of violence, the Arab–Israeli wars have been comparatively modest.
In contrast, the Iran–Iraq War had by far the most battle deaths of any of MENA’s wars, at over 644,000. Indeed, according to political scientists Bethany Lacina and Nils Petter Gleditsch’s global study of battle deaths, it ranks just behind the Vietnam War, Korean wars, and the Chinese civil war as the bloodiest war since 1945.29 The Iran–Iraq War illustrates the overlap and intersection between the ways wars are organized and their magnitude. It is commonly dubbed the largest interstate war fought between Third World countries. Contemporary commentators marveled at how the Iraqi and Iranian militaries were organized in conventional military formats and adopted modern weaponry supplied from Europe and the United States. The size of their armies was truly staggering. Iran began the war with about 270,000 soldiers in seven divisions. By war’s end, it had 850,000 men, mostly conscripts, in 48 divisions. Iraq began the war with 12 divisions and 250,000 men under arms, an already remarkable 1.9 percent of its total population. By war’s end, it had 51 divisions and an astounding 800,000 troops.30 Some features of the Iran–Iraq War were reminiscent of World War I, such as the extensive use of trench warfare along the southern front and the resort to chemical weapons. Others aspects harkened to World War II, including massive bombardment of cities. Internal struggle between regimes and oppositions, particularly Kurdish opposition forces in both Iran and Iraq, was also an important dimension of this conflagration. While conventional fighting occurred along the southern and central Iraqi–Iranian frontier, northern Iraq was the stage for a protracted counterinsurgency campaign. At the end of the war, Baghdad sought to scotch the Kurdish threat definitively. Iraqi forces and locally raised militias massacred Kurdish civilians and destroyed their villages in order to root out the insurgents. The Iraqi army began using chemical weapons against Kurdish villages to finish off the work of ethnic cleansing. This campaign, which the Iraqi military code-named the Anfal, claimed at least 50,000 lives.31
Since the late twentieth century, MENA has had the unfortunate distinction of being a region where high-magnitude violence is increasing. PRIO/UCDP researchers have calculated the number of fatalities in war since 1989. Four MENA countries – Iraq, Syria, Sudan, and Yemen – were among the top twenty countries, as shown in Table 1.1. The magnitude of these conflicts is even clearer when fatalities are standardized by total population size. Note that even these figures, though, neglect the practically difficult issue of indirect deaths, which can be orders of magnitude higher.32
The UCDP data also provide a way to analyze the form of violence by distinguishing between three types of conflicts:
Table 1.1 Conflict-affected countries by fatalities, top twenty countries, 1989–2017
Source: Therése Pettersson and Kristine Eck, “Organized Violence, 1989–2017,” Journal of Peace Research 55, no. 4 (July 2018): 535–47.
| Country | Total fatalities | Magnitude (dead per 1,000 pop.) |
|---|---|---|
| Rwanda | 520,639 | 62.51 |
| Syria | 313,418 | 18.69 |
| Afghanistan | 200,552 | 9.57 |
| Ethiopia |
|