Dr Nafeez Ahmed (an investigative journalist, international security scholar and bestselling author) on Muslim Holocaust (2016): “According to the figures explored here, total deaths from Western interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan since the 1990s - from direct killings and the longer-term impact of war-imposed deprivation - likely constitute around 4 million (2 million in Iraq from 1991-2003, plus 2 million from the “war on terror”), and could be as high as 6-8 million people when accounting for higher avoidable death estimates in Afghanistan.Such figures could well be too high, but will never know for sure. US and UK armed forces, as a matter of policy, refuse to keep track of the civilian death toll of military operations - they are an irrelevant inconvenience.Due to the severe lack of data in Iraq, almost complete non-existence of records in Afghanistan, and the indifference of Western governments to civilian deaths, it is literally impossible to determine the true extent of loss of life. In the absence of even the possibility of corroboration, these figures provide plausible estimates based on applying standard statistical methodology to the best, if scarce, evidence available. They give an indication of the scale of the destruction, if not the precise detail. Much of this death has been justified in the context of fighting tyranny and terrorism. Yet thanks to the silence of the wider media, most people have no idea of the true scale of protracted terror wrought in their name by US and UK tyranny in Iraq and Afghanistan” (Nafeez Ahmed, “Unworthy victims: Western wars have killed four million Muslims since 1990”, Middle East Eye, 18 April 2016: https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/unworthy-victims-western-wars-have-killed-four-million-muslims-1990 ).
AHMED, Nafeez. UK writer on deaths in War on Terror. Nafeez Ahmed (UK-based scholar and writer) on 6 million deaths in War on Terror (2021): “For instance, six months after the bombing campaign in Afghanistan in 2001, data assessed by the Guardian revealed that, although between 1,300 and 1,800 Afghans were killed directly, as many as 20,000 and possibly as high as 49,600 people had died due to the indirect consequences of the military intervention. In this case, the total number of indirect deaths was at least 15 times higher than direct deaths. If that higher, empirically-substantiated ratio was applied to the Costs of War direct death figures in Afghanistan since 9/11 (176,000 people), it would imply 2,640,000 indirect deaths in that country to date, which would suggest that in just one country a total of about 2.8 million Afghans have been killed due to the War on Terror. This scale of violence has been corroborated by one other assessment of avoidable mortality in Afghanistan by retired La Trobe University biochemist Dr Gideon Polya. His book, Body Count: Global Avoidable Mortality Since 1950, put total excess deaths of Afghans since 2001 at three million” (Nafeez Ahmed, “Up to six million people. The unrecorded fatalities of the War on Terror”, Byline Times, 15 September 2021: https://bylinetimes.com/2021/09/15/up-to-six-million-people-the-unrecorded-fatalities-of-the-war-on-terror/ .)