BBC reports the death toll from the second intifada at roughly 4000. Iraq Body Count offers an estimate of civilian deaths in Iraq between 39,000 and 43,000 – a study from Johns Hopkins projects a much larger number, 100,000 by October 2004. Marc Herold at UNH projects between 3 and 4,000 civilian deaths in Afghanistan from October 2001 – June 2004. Military casualties include 407 coalition casualties in Afghanistan and 2,564 coalition deaths in Iraq. Using the JHU study’s controversial (but, in my opinion, highly defensible) calculation, the Middle East has seen at least 111,000 military and civilian casualites in the past decade.
A recent study in the Lancet projects 3.8 million deaths in the Democratic Republic of Congo, using estimation techniques to compare death counts prior to and following the years of war in DRC. Estimates of deaths in Darfur begin as low as 70,000 and go up to 350,000. Ongoing conflicts in northern Uganda have displaced 1.6 million people and has a likely death rate that exceeds that of Iraq during the first months of the US invasion. In total, it’s likely that, over the past decade, at least forty times as many people have died directly or indirectly from violent conflict in central Africa as have died in the Middle East.
