While the sanctions placed on Iraq by the United Nations Security Council in the 1990s may be a distant memory for some, it's critical to remember the shameful aftermath as the Trump administration undertakes the sanctioning of certain specific individuals in Syria. No matter the position one might take on the issue of sanctions, the fact remains that they caused a decade of tremendous suffering and widespread deaths of Iraqi civilians, many of them children.
Iraq Sanctions Led to Grievous Death TollThe widely-reported number of children who died as a result of the sanctions has been as high as
576,000, although one subsequent report
estimated 227,000 and a second approximated 350,000. Chuck Sudetic, a journalist who spent time in Basra
documenting how sanctions affected the city, wrote in late 2001 that "According to an estimate by Amatzia Baram, an Iraq analyst at the University of Haifa in Israel,
between 1991 and 1997 half a million Iraqis died of malnutrition, preventable disease, lack of medicine, and other factors attributable to the sanctions; most were elderly people or children. The United Nations Children's Fund puts the death toll during the same period at more than
1 million of Iraq's 23 million people." Despite conflicting estimates, each set of figures are staggering and tragic.
The United States Security Council Resolution 661 was adopted in August of 1990 following Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, "imposing comprehensive multilateral international sanctions on Iraq and freezing all its foreign assets. Iraq was no longer free to import anything not expressly permitted by the United Nations, and companies were forbidden from doing business with Iraq, with very limited exceptions," according to David Rieff writing for
The New York Times in 2003.
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