On the anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, March 20, 2003 Iraq Body Count

There is nothing to "commemorate" about the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, but it needs remembering in every civilian life-destroying detail. The deadly first weeks, drawn from @iraqbodycount analyses, are summarised in https://www.iraqbodycount.org/analysis/reference/pdf/a_dossier_of_civilian_casualties_2003-2005.pdf.

The rate at which civilians were killed by invading US-led forces in the 21 days from March 20 to the "fall of Baghdad" on April 9 was 315 per day. So high compared to the following 2-year period it could not fit on the same graph.

By 18 Apr, “coalition aircraft dropped on Iraq a total of 29,199 bombs, rockets, and missiles of all varieties.” 2/3 were “precision guided weapons”, 1/3 “unguided”. 78% of 20,000+ airstrikes supported ground forces using their own devastating arms. https://www.airforcemag.com/PDF/MagazineArchive/Magazine%20Documents/2003/July%202003/0703Numbers.pdf

?For every civilian reported killed (predominantly by explosive weapons, airborne or artillery) more than three were reported injured, bringing the total killed and injured in the invasion phase to 22,733.

The “unguided” weapons included cluster bombs and their many (uncounted) ‘bomblets’, including those that lie in wait for children: IBC documented 352–507 civilians killed and 1,652–2,042 wounded in incidents involving these still-to-be-universally-banned WMDs. https://fair.org/take-action/action-alerts/tv-not-concerned-by-cluster-bombs-du/

Only around 80 civilians killed during the invasion (around 1% of the total) were?humanised by their full names in media reports at the time (see: https://www.iraqbodycount.org/analysis/beyond/100-names/).??

The task of publicly and individually recognising every victim of the Iraq war remains largely un-finished. An example of how recent witness testimony has filled in one missing part of that larger picture from the invasion phase is given at https://www.iraqbodycount.org/database/incidents/a6384

?In the intensity of “Shock and Awe” relatively few casualty reports emerged: most appeared in the later (comparative) calm. Early releases from Iraqi officials (dismissed as “propaganda") turned out to be true or an under-representation. https://archive.globalpolicy.org/security/issues/iraq/attack/2003/0610aptallies.htm

The invasion — with its highest intensity per-day of deaths — enabled all that followed: a brutal occupation, the torture halls of Abu Ghraib, the 2004 sieges & mass slaughters in Fallujah, 1700 suicide bombs & sectarian conflicts claiming more than 200,000 civilian lives.

All of which underlines the Nuremberg prosecutors’ declaration that to initiate a war of aggression “is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.” https://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/09-30-46.asp