In modern wars, 85-90% of deaths are civilians — per the United Nations and international aid organizations including the International Committee of the Red Cross.
From a 2014 policy statement issued by the nearly 150-year old, 25,000-member strong, physician-founded organization, the American Public Health Association (APHA):
“The proportion of civilian deaths and the methods for classifying deaths as civilian are debated, but civilian war deaths constitute 85% to 90% of casualties caused by war, with about 10 civilians dying for every combatant killed in battle.”
(Per the U.N.’s statistics, that 85-90% number represents a 70-75% uptick from just 15% civilian casualties in World War I, back when soldiers fought soldiers on battlefields, instead of butchering women and children from remote locations, launching “Hellfire” missiles into densely-populated areas.)
Also appearing in that 2014 policy statement from APHA:
“The United States launched 201 overseas military operations between the end of World War II and 2001, and since then, others, including Afghanistan and Iraq. During the 20th century, 190 million deaths could be directly and indirectly related to war — more than in the previous four centuries (combined).”
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THIS HAS BEEN A HUMANITARIAN REMINDER… as our nation contemplates yet another war in the Middle East, this time against Iran… as hawkish members of Congress and our warmongering corporate media try to cajole and bait our unpredictable, dunce president into a war he has repeatedly stated he doesn’t want.
(Not to say Iran hasn’t been asking for it: In the early 1950’s, Iran had the nerve to democratically elect a leader, Mohammad Mossadegh, who had the radical idea of allowing Iranians to profit from their nation’s petroleum resources rather than letting British Petroleum and U.S. corporations suck their nation dry; in the 1970’s, the Iranian people rose up and deposed the torturing, secret police-employing Shah, Reza Pahlavi, the despotic puppet the U.S. had replaced Mossadegh with in 1953, following the CIA’s violent overthrow of his government; the Iranians also had the chutzpah to say mean things about us after we sicced Saddam Hussein on them — with the WMD we’d supplied him — resulting in one million Iranian deaths; and they said even more mean things about us after U.S.S. Vincennes shot down their civilian airliner in 1988, killing all 290 passengers and crew, including 66 children; in the early 2000’s, the Iranians were foolish enough to partner with the U.S. in Afghanistan and Iraq, only to be labeled members of a (fictional) “Axis of Evil” and targeted anew; and over the last decade, Iran has had the temerity to support liberation movements in Lebanon, Palestine, and Yemen, and lend military and other resources to the Syrian people’s fight against al Qaeda and ISIS, two of the CIA’s most important allies in Washington’s regime-change wars. All that, plus not having a nuclear weapons program — per U.N.’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and America’s 17 intelligence agencies — making our media and politicians look like jingoist propagandists pushing the genocidal neocon agenda… it’s like I said, Tehran is just plain asking for more economy-crushing sanctions, Washington/Tel Aviv-backed terrorist attacks, and the full Bolton treatment, “Shock and Awe”…)
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ADDENDUM (5/24/19):
The story of Raqqa, Syria, a modern-day Guernica, undercuts the propaganda of the corporate media (“Assad bad, U.S. intervention good”).
From the article (detailing the effects of the U.S., U.K., and French airstrikes):
“…the U.S.-led bombing campaign on Raqqa, Syria in 2017—which one military commander at the time claimed was the ‘most precise air campaign in history’—killed an estimated 1,600 innocent civilians while leveling the city on a scale unparalleled in recent decades.
“The research collated almost two years of investigations into the assault on Raqqa, the groups said in a statement, and ‘gives a brutally vivid account’ of the enormous number of civilian lives lost as ‘a direct result’ of thousands of coalition air strikes and tens of thousands of US artillery strikes in Raqqa from June to October 2017.”
“Donatella Rovera, a crisis investigator for Amnesty, shared some of what she found in Raqqa in a video the group released along with the report. ‘When I first came to Raqqa after the war, I knew that relentless American, British, and French bombardment killed civilians and destroyed much of the city,’ Rovera said. ‘What I came to discover was that little or no protection was afforded to the thousands of civilians who were trapped in the city,’ she added. ‘Raqqa is the most destroyed city in modern times in terms of percentage. There is no part of Raqqa which has been left untouched.'”
“The U.S. strikes represent the equivalent of one strike every six minutes for four months.”
“Civilians—who for four years had been essentially held captive in Raqqa by ISIS as the armed group set up checkpoints restricting movement, planted land mines in exit routes, and used residents as human shields—suffered fresh brutality from the U.S. and its allies as they claimed to be ‘liberating’ the city.”
[While President Obama and (U.K. prime minister) Theresa May spent years protecting ISIS — after years of using radical Salafist militants, including ISIS and al Qaeda, to pressure the Assad regime into surrender (an effort that failed) — Donald Trump, eager to end the mission and withdraw our troops, decided early on to simply raze the terrorists’ last strongholds: in Mosul, Iraq, and in Raqqa, Syria. Trump loosened the rules of engagement, guaranteeing a massive loss in civilian lives as a direct result of U.S. airstrikes (and those of our British and French allies). But lest we apply a double-standard, those who readily excuse Israeli war crimes — operations that routinely kill 50-66% civilians, as in Lebanon 2006 and 2008’s Operation Cast Lead, in Gaza — should be quick to forgive Donald Trump’s egregious war crimes, on the same basis: The terrorists used “human shields.”]