How Safe Is Iraq Now?

It’s well-known that violence in Iraq has declined, but you might surprised to learn just how far.

Taking the 2008 numbers from icasaulties.org, we find 5929 violent deaths in the country. This number is probably overstated (the official number from the gov’t of Iraq is lower — 5714) as the icasaulties.org numbers come from Iraq Body Count, an explicitly anti-war site that relies on newspaper reports (Iraq’s free press is only a few years old and tends to print wild rumors that turn out to be exaggerated), but should serve as a reasonable compromise. Divided by Iraq’s population of 28.2 million, that gives us a violent death rate of 21 per 100,000. 

How does that compare to other countries? Well, in 2008, Iraq had a lower violent death rate than quite a few countries in Africa (including South Africa), South America (including Brazil) and Central America (including Venezuela), as well as popular tourist destination Jamaica(!).  While you’re  not likely to see “Vacation in Sunny Iraq” (or “Sunni Iraq” for that matter) ad campaigns from travel agencies anytime soon (and Iraq’s current, arguably tenuous peace is kept with hundreds of thousands of security personnel) it’s certainly an interesting piece of context, as those countries are generally not considered to be in any special distress.

And Iraq is actually less violent than the 2008 numbers would indicate.  Remember, in the first half of the year Iraqi forces fought pitched battles to liberate Shia cities from the Sadrists, which vastly improved conditions from Basra to Al Kut but caused deaths to spike over the months of active operations.  Taking just the last six months of data, when those operations had largely wound down, we get a violent death rate of just 14.3 — less violent than Puerto Rico or Russia.