Iraqi civilians suffered some of the highest casualties in 2016 since the U.S. invasion of Iraq, according to the British group Iraq Body Count.
The group noted that nearly 16,000 civilians died in 2016, amid the U.S.-backed Iraqi Security Forces’ push on cities held by the Islamic State.
ISIS routinely uses human shields to block U.S. airstrikes, and has employed civilian shields in the grueling street-by-street fight in the city of Mosul. Nearly 1 million civilians remain inside the city, with the majority still being held by ISIS after almost three months of non-stop operations.
Since President Barack Obama’s withdrawal from Iraq in 2011, the country has seen the highest numbers of civilian casualties. As ISIS began to sweep across the western Anbar province in 2014, the watchdog group reported an unprecedented 20,000 civilian casualties. Throughout the following year, the U.S. and Iraqi Security Forces focused on training missions and airstrikes, giving rise to another 17,000 casualties among civilians.
When Obama took office in 2009, he was determined to pull troops out of Iraq as soon as possible. Obama believed the historic lows of violence in Iraq justified his campaign pledge to bring the war to an end without keeping a significant U.S. presence in Iraq to ensure stability. Obama’s defenders have also pointed to former President George W. Bush’s 2008 status of force commitment as justification for their withdrawal.
“This was not inevitable, nor pre-ordained,” wrote Emma Sky, a top adviser of Army Gen. Ray Odierno, about Obama’s precipitous withdrawal. In a 2015 op-ed for the New York Times largely focused on Syrian refugees, Sky laid out in stark terms just how much US “disengagement” damaged Iraq’s security stance.
“What [Obama] fails to acknowledge is that after the colossal mistakes at the beginning of the Iraq war, the United States midwifed the emergence, from 2007 to 2009, of an inclusive political order and gained Sunni support to defeat Al Qaeda. The tragedy was that U.S. disengagement, and the overtly sectarian policies of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, led it all to unravel.”
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