Analysis: Human costs of full-scale civil war in Iraq could be catastrophic

Bosnian refugees. If civil war in Iraq resembled Bosnia: 1.5 million would be killed and 13.9 million would be displaced

A FULL-SCALE CIVIL WAR in Iraq could result in hundreds of thousands of deaths and millions of refugees streaming across the nation’s borders. The level of killings and displacement from other major civil conflicts - such as those in Bosnia, Congo, Lebanon and Rwanda - suggests the toll in Iraq could surge even higher if conditions there deteriorate further.

To calculate projections, percentages of those killed and displaced were applied to Iraq’s population of about 26 million. The sources for the previous civil wars come from Amnesty International; Center for the Study of Civil War; CIA World Factbook; Richard Holbrooke’s “To End a War” and the World Bank.

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