Yemeni War Deaths Have Been Underestimated by 5 to 1
November 12, 2018 Save
Civilian casualties in the three-year horror in Yemen has been vastly
underestimated by mainstream organizations, reports Nicolas Davies.
Total Deaths in Yemen
Top More Than 100,000
By Nicolas J. S. Davies
An NGO responsible for reporting on war deaths in Yemen has acknowledged
that it has underestimated the casualties in the three-year-old conflict by
at least five to one.
Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project had originally estimated that
about 10,000 people had been killed in the war in Yemen, roughly the same
number reported by the World Health Organization. WHO surveys are regularly
cited as estimates of war deaths in Yemen by UN agencies and the world's
media. But ACLED now estimates the true number of people killed in Yemen is
probably between 70,000 and 80,000.
ACLED's estimates do not include the thousands of Yemenis who have died from
the war's indirect consequences, such as starvation and preventable diseases
like diphtheria and cholera. UNICEF reported in December 2016 that a child
was dying every 10 minutes in Yemen, and the humanitarian crisis has only
worsened since then. At that rate the total of all deaths caused directly
and indirectly by the war must by now be more than one hundred thousand.
Another NGO, the Yemen Data Project, revealed in September 2016 that at
least a third of Saudi-led airstrikes, many of which involve U.S.-built and
(until Friday U.S.-refueled warplanes) using U.S.-made bombs, were hitting
hospitals, schools, markets, mosques, and other civilian targets. This has
left at least half the hospitals and health facilities in Yemen damaged or
destroyed, according to the Yemen Data Project, leaving them hardly able to
treat the casualties of the war or serve their communities, let alone to
compile meaningful figures for the WHO's surveys.
Even comprehensive surveys of fully functioning hospitals would capture
only a fraction of the violent deaths in a war-torn country like Yemen,
where most of those killed in the war do not die in hospitals. And yet the
UN and the world's media have continued to cite the WHO surveys as reliable
estimates of the total number of people killed in Yemen.
Dramatically Wrong
In a three-part series for Consortium News in April, I claimed that such
estimates of civilian deaths in U.S. war zones were likely to be
dramatically wrong because that is what epidemiologists have found whenever
they have conducted serious mortality studies based on well-established
statistical principles in war zones around the world.
Epidemiologists recently used some of the same techniques to estimate that
about 3,000 people died as a result of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico.
Studies in war-ravaged Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo have been
widely cited by Western political leaders and the Western media with no hint
of controversy.
Some of the same public health experts who had worked in Rwanda and Congo
used the same methods to estimate how many people had been killed as a
result of the U.S. and U.K.'s invasion and occupation of Iraq. In two
studies they published in the Lancet medical journal in 2004 and 2006, they
found that about 600,000 people had been killed in the first three years of
war and occupation.
White and red flags, representing Iraqi and American deaths, in the quad of
Oregon State University campus. (Wikimedia Commons)
Broad acceptance of these results would have been politically disastrous
for the U.S. and UK governments. It would also have further discredited the
Western media that had supported the invasion of Iraq and were still blaming
the Iraqi victims of the illegal invasion of their country for the violence
and chaos of the occupation. The British Defence Ministry's chief
scientific advisor described the Lancet studies' design as "robust" and
their methods as "close to best practice," and British officials admitted
privately that they were "likely to be right." The U.S. and UK governments
nonetheless launched a concerted campaign to discredit them.
No Scientific Basis
In 2005, as American and British officials and their acolytes in the
corporate media discounted his work, Les Roberts, the lead author of the
2004 study, told the UK media watchdog Media Lens, "It is odd that the logic
of epidemiology embraced by the press every day regarding new drugs or
health risks somehow changes when the mechanism of death is their armed
forces."
Roberts, at Johns Hopkins School of Public Health at the time of the 2004
study and now at Columbia, accurately said there was no legitimate
scientific basis for the objections being raised to his work and its
results. But it was not so odd that embattled political leaders would use
all the tools at their disposal to try to salvage their careers and
reputations-and to preserve the U.S. and UK's future freedom of action to
destroy countries that stand in their way.
By 2005, most Western journalists in Iraq were hunkered down in Baghdad's
fortified Green Zone, reporting mainly from the CENTCOM briefing room. If
they ventured out, they were embedded with U.S. forces traveling by
helicopter or armored convoy between fortified U.S.bases. Dahr Jamail was
one of a few brave, un-embedded Americans reporting from Iraq. (He later
named his book about his time there Beyond the Green Zone.) Dahr told me he
thought the true number of Iraqis killed might well be even higher than the
Lancet studies' estimates and that it was certainly not much lower, as the
Western propaganda machine insisted it was.
Unlike Western governments and the Western media in the Iraq case, and UN
agencies and the same Western media in Afghanistan and Yemen, ACLED does not
defend its earlier, inadequate estimates of war deaths in Yemen. Instead, it
is conducting a thorough review of its sources to come up with a more
realistic estimate of how many people have been killed. Working back from
the present, it now estimates that 56,000 people have been killed since
January 2016.
Andrea Carboni of ACLED told Patrick Cockburn of The Independent newspaper
in Britain that he believes ACLED's estimate of the number killed in three
and a half years of war on Yemen will be between 70,000 and 80,000 once it
has finished reviewing its sources back to March 2015, when Saudi Arabia,
the U.S., and their allies started the war.
But the true number of people killed in Yemen is inevitably even higher than
ACLED's revised estimate. As I explained in my Consortium News report, no
such effort to count the dead by reviewing media reports, hospital records,
and other "passive" sources, no matter how thoroughly, can ever fully count
the dead amid the widespread violence and chaos of a country ravaged by war.
This is why epidemiologists have developed statistical techniques to produce
more accurate estimates of how many people have really been killed in the
world's war zones. The world still waits for that kind of genuine accounting
of the true human cost of the Saudi-U.S. war in Yemen and, indeed, of all
America's post-9/11 wars.
A earlier version of this article appeared on CounterPunch.
Nicolas J.S. Davies is the author of Blood On Our Hands: the American
Invasion and Destruction of Iraq. He also wrote the chapter on "Obama at
War" in Grading the 44th President: a Report Card on Barack Obama's First
Term as a Progressive Leader.
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