TEHRAN (Iran News) – When on September 1, 2001, the U.S. was targeted by a terrorist attack, many people cast doubt on the attack and claimed it was dubious because such an attack was impossible especially in the middle of New York unless the terrorists had received a green light and now coming reports claim that the attack was an excuse and a license for the deaths of over 4.5m people.
A new report on Friday revealed that the wars initiated by the United States in the Middle East and North Africa following the September 11 attacks have directly or indirectly killed at least 4.5 million people and displaced millions of others.
According to the research report from the Costs of War project at Brown University Watson Institute, nearly one million people were directly killed as a result of conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, Yemen, Libya and Somalia.
The report, released on May 15, also estimated that at least 3.6 to 3.7 million of the casualties were “indirect” deaths caused by a variety of factors, including failed economies, extreme poverty, malnutrition, disease, destroyed health infrastructure, environmental contamination and reverberating trauma and violence.
The numbers of direct and indirect war casualties are still continuing to grow from ongoing global conflicts after more than two decades, the report added.
“These wars are ongoing for millions around the world who are living with and dying from their effects,” it said, emphasizing that women and children “suffer the brunt of the impact.”
“Indirect deaths are devastating, not least because so many of them could be prevented, were it not for war,” the report said, adding that it is difficult to estimate indirect deaths, as they do not occur immediately after the battles.
“A death from hunger mostly occurs at some distance from this attention to spectacle and it may happen months or years after war disrupts access to food. Often, people affected by war are displaced and transient, making them hard to track.”
The report also acknowledged that it is difficult to disentangle indirect war death factors from the ones that might have occurred in places where people are already suffering from high rates of poverty, disease, and malnutrition.
It singled out the U.S. for its role in many post-9/11 wars, particularly the casualties over the past 20-plus years in Afghanistan.
Though the U.S. withdrew its military forces from Afghanistan in 2021, officially ending the war, Afghans are “suffering and dying from war-related causes at higher rates than ever.”
The U.S. invaded Afghanistan in October 2001 following the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, despite the fact that no Afghan national was involved in the attacks. Hundreds of thousands of Afghans died in the US war of aggression on the country. Nevertheless, the Taliban returned to power in 2021, 20 years after their removal by US forces.
The report also called on Washington to make reparations for the damage inflicted by post-9/11 conflicts, saying, “Reparations, though not easy or cheap, are imperative.”
“In laying out how the post-9/11 wars have led to illness and indirect deaths, the report’s goal is to build greater awareness of the fuller human costs of these wars and support calls for the United States and other governments to alleviate the ongoing losses and suffering of millions in current and former war zones,” it said.
Stephanie Savell, the report’s author and co-director of the Costs of War project also noted that “there are reverberating costs, the human cost of war, that people for the most part in the United States don’t really know enough about or think about.”
The author further stated that the researchers applied the Geneva Declaration Secretariat’s average ratio of four indirect deaths for every one direct death, adding that while that ratio may be lower in Iraq, it would be higher in Yemen or Afghanistan and thus the ratio was deemed accurate to arrive at the “reasonable and conservative” estimate of 4.5-4.6 million.
This report once again reiterated that the attack was dubious and it was a reason for military actions and killing of many people in the world under the pretext of fighting terrorism.
Of course, Western countries, especially the U.S., have always sought some reasons, either true or baseless ones, to take military action in different countries and the 9/11 was the best excuse for the all-out presence of the Western states in different parts of the world especially in Afghanistan and in the Middle East states.
We have not yet forgotten the Persian Gulf War and the U.S. attack on Iraq under the baseless claim of Iraq’s having weapons of mass destruction that the world after months of destructive war learned that the West’s claim was baseless and this continued when four coordinated suicide terrorist attacks were carried out by the militant Islamist extremist network al-Qaeda against the United States. That morning, 19 terrorists hijacked four commercial airliners scheduled to travel from the New England and Mid-Atlantic regions of the East Coast to California. The hijackers crashed the first two planes into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, which were two of the top five-tallest buildings in the world at the time.
When the attack was carried out, many analysts cast their doubt on the attack and claimed that there is something fishy about it and as the time passes on, we realize those analysts were right and the attack is used as an excuse for the presence of the U.S. and its allies in the Middle East or in any other part of the world where they feel their presence is needed.
The recent report shows that 9/11 is a reason and excuse for the West to continue their presence and crimes in any part of the world under the pretext of fighting terrorism.
