US 'war on terror' killed half million people: study

By Umar Farooq

WASHINGTON (AA) - Nearly a half million people have been killed by the U.S. "war on terror" that was started in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, according to a study by Brown University.

Brown University's Cost of War Project, who released the report Saturday, tracked the total number of deaths at the hands of the U.S. in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan to be somewhere between 480,000 and 507,000 people.

Of these deaths, 65,000 were in Pakistan, 147,000 were in Afghanistan, and 268,000 - 295,000 were in Iraq. Some 7,000 American soldiers have been killed over the last 17 years.

The study does not include more than 500,000 deaths in the war in Syria, which the U.S. entered in 2014, nor did it include the number of deaths from the retaking of Mosul and other cities in Iraq, where possibly tens of thousands of civilians died.

The report understood that the tally is "incomplete", however it serves as an "estimate of the human toll of killing in these wars."

"This update just scratches the surface of the human consequences of 17 years of war," the report said.

While many in the public see these wars as dwindling down, and are less intense, the civilian death count in Afghanistan for 2018 is one of the highest in the war.

“It is important for policy makers and others to view the effects and implications of these wars together, because they are so interconnected,” Neto Crawford, author of the study, said.