The lowest Iraq estimate 120k dead civilians or so in the course of decade long conflict. This certainly tracks with estimates of Ukrainian civilian deaths.
And while Kharkiv was not thoroughly obliterated it was mainly though the strength of defensive efforts. Other cities were left in a condition that makes any comparison to Baghdad laughable.
A town of 10 000, completely destroyed, uninhabitable. Current population: 0. With scenes like these, threats of nuclear attack lose potency. Marinka looks indistinguishable from Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Bakhmut and other frontline towns didn't fare any better. A group of scientists tracked the destruction with a synthetic aperture radar:
“After Hang processed the images and we saw the end result, it looked like a checkerboard or mesh,” Barbot said. “We asked, ‘Why is that?’ and we realized that it’s only the roads that survived. Everything else was collapsed, destroyed, evaporated, and the entire city is completely flattened.”
“You can see a neighborhood going away, and then another and then there’s no progress because of a natural obstacle like a river,” Barbot said. “After they’ve bombarded enough stuff, the front line begins to move to the west and the Russian army advances through the crumbles. Eventually the story repeats itself and after a year, there’s just nothing left. It looks like cancer spreading throughout the body.”
In Iraq, there were 10s of thousands of civilian casualties estimated within the first few days of the invasion. That's more than the entire casualty estimate for Ukraine so far.
The outside estimates I've seen from Ukrainian sources say 25k total.
Your estimate is 2x-4x higher. How is that?
In Mariupol alone there were ~10,000 new graves on satellite imagery and some of them are large enough for multiple bodies, which we know was done in Lyman when those mass graves were excavated.
Because you don't know what source I'm referring to, how can you possibly know?
Baghdad still stands. Many Ukrainian towns are nothing but a name on a map and a pile of rubble on the ground. I didn't mean to leave an impression as if all inhabitants have been killed, but the towns have ceased to exist as places of human settlement.
> In Iraq, there were 10s of thousands of civilian casualties estimated within the first few days of the invasion.
Certainly not, that's an insane number. Common estimates put the number of civilian casualties in low thousands for the entire invasion phase that lasted several months, and these figures include deaths from indirect causes such as crime related to breakdown of social order, which contributed roughly as much as the invading force itself, if you trust the data from Iraqi Body Count project.
> That's more than the entire casualty estimate for Ukraine so far.
Everyone doing estimates stresses that they severely undercount due to lack of access to occupied areas. You are comparing a clearly inflated Iraqi figures against clearly undercounted Ukrainian figures.
While formally not civilians, many who have died as Russian combatants were Ukrainian civilians who were forcibly conscripted from occupied areas. These so-called "mobiks" alone make up tens of thousands of dead because they were untrained, poorly equipped and expendable.
[1]: Russia routinely fires cluster munitions into densely populated cities, eg https://www.bbc.com/ukrainian/features-60941459
Like I said, I heard first hand from a US veteran who served there in Iraq and was with me in Ukraine. He said Iraq was "much worse" in terms of civilian casualties in his estimation. Almost all statistical estimates you can find online also seem to confirm this, the civilian death toll was much worse in Iraq.
The claim is definitely extraordinary since both wars are extensively documented, and we just know (like, we have verifiable videos) that Russia has much, much less regard for civilian casualties, employs much less precise fires, and Ukraine is more populous and dense than Iraq.
Besides, the numbers I could find are the other way around. This study [1] estimates 3,750 civilian deaths in Iraq, and this UN report [2] says 10,582 recorded civilian deaths (that is, it's definitely an undercount, unlike the estimation in Iraq).
[1]: https://www.comw.org/pda/0310rm8.html#3.3.%20Total%20Iraqi%2...
[2]: https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/2024-02/two-year-u...