Casualties
The Global War of Terror has seen fewer war deaths than any other decade in the past century.
There is no widely agreed on figure for the number of people that have been killed so far in the War on Terror as it has been defined by the Bush Administration to include the war in Afghanistan, the war in Iraq, and operations elsewhere. Some estimates include the following:
- Iraq: 62,570 to 1,124,000
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- Opinion Research Business (ORB) poll conducted 12–19 August 2007 estimated 1,033,000 violent deaths due to the Iraq War. The range given was 946,000 to 1,120,000 deaths. A nationally representative sample of approximately 2,000 Iraqi adults answered whether any members of their household (living under their roof) were killed due to the Iraq War. 22% of the respondents had lost one or more household members. ORB reported that "48% died from a gunshot wound, 20% from the impact of a car bomb, 9% from aerial bombardment, 6% as a result of an accident and 6% from another blast/ordnance."
- Between 392,979 and 942,636 estimated Iraqi (655,000 with a confidence interval of 95%), civilian and combatant, according to the second Lancet survey of mortality.
- A minimum of 62,570 civilian deaths reported in the mass media up to 28 April 2007 according to Iraq Body Count project.
- 4410 US military dead. 31,844 wounded in action, of which 13,954 were unable to return to duty within 72 hours.
- Afghanistan: between 10,960 and 49,600
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- According to Marc W. Herold's extensive database, between 3,100 and 3,600 civilians were directly killed by US Operation Enduring Freedom bombing and Special Forces attacks between 7 October 2001 and 3 June 2003. This estimate counts only "impact deaths"—deaths that occurred in the immediate aftermath of an explosion or shooting—and does not count deaths that occurred later as a result of injuries sustained, or deaths that occurred as an indirect consequence of the US airstrikes and invasion.
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- In an opinion article published in August 2002 in the magazine The Weekly Standard, Joshua Muravchik of the American Enterprise Institute, questioned Professor Herold's study entirely on the basis of one single incident that involved 25–93 deaths. He did not provide any estimate his own.
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- In a pair of January 2002 studies, Carl Conetta of the Project on Defense Alternatives estimates that "at least" 4,200–4,500 civilians were killed by mid-January 2002 as a result of the US war and airstrikes, both directly as casualties of the aerial bombing campaign, and indirectly in the resulting humanitarian crisis.
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- His first study, "Operation Enduring Freedom: Why a Higher Rate of Civilian Bombing Casualties?", released 18 January 2002, estimates that, at the low end, "at least" 1,000–1,300 civilians were directly killed in the aerial bombing campaign in just the 3 months between 7 October 2001 to 1 January 2002. The author found it impossible to provide an upper-end estimate to direct civilian casualties from the Operation Enduring Freedom bombing campaign that he noted as having an increased use of cluster bombs. In this lower-end estimate, only Western press sources were used for hard numbers, while heavy "reduction factors" were applied to Afghan government reports so that their estimates were reduced by as much as 75%.
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- In his companion study, "Strange Victory: A critical appraisal of Operation Enduring Freedom and the Afghanistan war", released 30 January 2002, Conetta estimates that "at least" 3,200 more Afghans died by mid-January 2002, of "starvation, exposure, associated illnesses, or injury sustained while in flight from war zones", as a result of the US war and airstrikes.
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- In similar numbers, a Los Angeles Times review of US, British, and Pakistani newspapers and international wire services found that between 1,067 and 1,201 direct civilian deaths were reported by those news organizations during the five months from 7 October 2001 to 28 February 2002. This review excluded all civilian deaths in Afghanistan that did not get reported by US, British, or Pakistani news, excluded 497 deaths that did get reported in US, British, and Pakistani news but that were not specifically identified as civilian or military, and excluded 754 civilian deaths that were reported by the Taliban but not independently confirmed.
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- According to Jonathan Steele of The Guardian between 20,000 and 49,600 people may have died of the consequences of the invasion by the spring of 2002.
- Pakistan: Between 1467 and 2334 people were killed in U.S. drone attacks as of 6 May 2011.
- Yemen
- Germany
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- Two Airmen were killed, another two were wounded at Frankfurt Airport by Arid Uka; they were en route to deployment to Afghanistan.
- Somalia: 7,000+
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- In December 2007, The Elman Peace and Human Rights Organization said it had verified 6,500 civilian deaths, 8,516 people wounded, and 1.5 million displaced from homes in Mogadishu alone during the year 2007.
- USA
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- Two radicals, John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo, conducted sniper attacks in Washington, D.C., Maryland, and Virginia in October 2002. Ten people were killed and three others were critically wounded in those shootings.
- 1 June 2009, Pvt. William Andrew Long was shot and killed by Abdulhakim Muhammad, while standing unarmed outside a recruiting facility in Little Rock AR.
- On 5 November 2009, Nidal Malik Hasan, an Islamic extremist, shot and killed 13 people and wounded 30 others in Fort Hood, Texas.
Total American casualties from the War on Terror
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| US Military killed | 5,921 |
| US Military wounded | 42,673 |
| US Civilians killed (includes 9/11 and after) | 3,000 + |
| US Civilians wounded/injured | 6,000 + |
| Total Americans killed (military and civilian) | 8,900 + |
| Total Americans wounded/injured | 48,000 + |
| Total American casualties | 56,900 + |
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