A civilian casualty occurs when a civilian is killed or injured by non-civilians, mostly law enforcement officers, military personnel, rebel group forces, or terrorists. Under the law of war, it refers to civilians who perish or suffer wounds as a result of wartime acts. The term is generally applied to situations in which violence is committed in pursuit of political goals. During periods of armed conflict, there are structures, actors, and processes at a number of levels that affect the likelihood of violence against civilians.
"Collateral damage" is a term for any incidental and undesired death, injury or other damage inflicted, especially on civilians, as the result of an activity. Originally coined to describe military operations, it is now also used in non-military contexts to refer to any unwanted fallout from an action.
A civilian is a person not a member of an armed force nor a person engaged in hostilities.
Non-combatant is a term of art in the law of war and international humanitarian law to refer to civilians who are not taking a direct part in hostilities; persons, such as combat medics and military chaplains, who are members of the belligerent armed forces but are protected because of their specific duties ; combatants who are placed hors de combat; and neutral persons, such as peacekeepers, who are not involved in fighting for one of the belligerents involved in a war. This particular status was first recognized under the Geneva Conventions with the First Geneva Convention of 1864.
Estimates of the casualties from the Iraq War have come in several forms, and those estimates of different types of Iraq War casualties vary greatly.
The aerial bombing of cities is an optional element of strategic bombing, which became widespread in warfare during World War I. The bombing of cities grew to a vast scale in World War II and is still practiced today. The development of aerial bombardment marked an increased capacity of armed forces to deliver ordnance from the air against combatants, military bases, and factories, with a greatly reduced risk to its ground forces. The killing of civilians and non-combatants in bombed cities has variously been a deliberate goal of strategic bombing, or unavoidable collateral damage resulting from intent and technology. A number of multilateral efforts have been made to restrict the use of aerial bombardment so as to protect non-combatants and other civilians.
A casualty, as a term in military usage, is a person in military service, combatant or non-combatant, who becomes unavailable for duty due to any of several circumstances, including death, injury, illness, missing, capture or desertion.
During the War in Afghanistan, according to the Costs of War Project the war killed 176,000 people in Afghanistan: 46,319 civilians, 69,095 military and police and at least 52,893 opposition fighters. However, the death toll is possibly higher due to unaccounted deaths by "disease, loss of access to food, water, infrastructure, and/or other indirect consequences of the war." According to the Uppsala Conflict Data Program, the conflict killed 212,191 people. The Cost of War project estimated in 2015 that the number who have died through indirect causes related to the war may be as high as 360,000 additional people based on a ratio of indirect to direct deaths in contemporary conflicts.
Marc Garlasco is an American military advisor for the Dutch non-governmental organization PAX. Early in his career, Garlasco served for seven years at the Pentagon, as a mid-level intelligence analyst, later becoming chief of high-value targeting. Garlasco left in 2003 and joined Human Rights Watch (HRW) as a senior military expert, where he investigated human rights issues in a number of different conflicts zones. He resigned from HRW in February 2010 and has since worked as a specialist on civilian protection, war crimes investigations, identification of weapons and civilian harm mitigation for – among others – the United Nations, the Center for Naval Analysis (CNA), the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), before starting at PAX in 2020. Garlasco lives in New York.
Targeted killing, or assassination is a tactic that the government of Israel has used during the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, the Iran–Israel proxy conflict, and other conflicts.
On July 12, 2007, a series of air-to-ground attacks were conducted by a team of two U.S. AH-64 Apache helicopters in Al-Amin al-Thaniyah, New Baghdad, during the Iraqi insurgency which followed the invasion of Iraq. On April 5, 2010, the attacks received worldwide coverage and controversy following the release of 39 minutes of classified gunsight footage by WikiLeaks. The video, which WikiLeaks titled Collateral Murder, showed the crew firing on a group of people and killing several of them, including two Reuters journalists, and then laughing at some of the casualties, all of whom were civilians. An anonymous U.S. military official confirmed the authenticity of the footage, which provoked global discussion on the legality and morality of the attacks.
Gaza War fatalities estimates made by human rights NGOs and by the involved combatants:
In armed conflicts, the civilian casualty ratio is the ratio of civilian casualties to combatant casualties, or total casualties. The measurement can apply either to casualties inflicted by or to a particular belligerent, casualties inflicted in one aspect or arena of a conflict or to casualties in the conflict as a whole. Casualties usually refer to both dead and injured. In some calculations, deaths resulting from famine and epidemics are included.
Casualties of the Iraqi insurgency (2011–present) refers to deaths and injuries in Iraq after the withdrawal of US forces at the end of the Iraq War on 18 December 2011, as fighting continued between the Iraqi government and anti-government forces in the Iraqi insurgency (2011–2013) and later escalated into the War in Iraq (2014–2017) and subsequent Iraqi insurgency (2017–present).
Since the September 11 attacks, the United States has carried out drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya.
Human shields are legally protected persons—either protected civilians or prisoners of war—who are either coerced or volunteer to deter attacks by occupying the space between a belligerent and a legitimate military target. The use of human shields is forbidden by Protocol I of the Geneva Conventions. It is also a specific intent war crime as codified in the Rome Statute, which was adopted in 1998. The language of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court prohibits "utilizing the presence of a civilian or other protected person to render certain points, areas, or military forces immune from military operations."
Casualty recording is the systematic and continuous process of documenting individual direct deaths from armed conflict or widespread violence. It aims to create a comprehensive account of all deaths within a determined scope, usually bound by time and location.
In international humanitarian law and international criminal law, an indiscriminate attack is a military attack that fails to distinguish between legitimate military targets and protected persons. Indiscriminate attacks strike both legitimate military and protected objects alike, thus violating the principle of distinction between combatants and protected civilians. They differ from direct attacks against protected civilians and encompass cases in which the perpetrators are indifferent as to the nature of the target, cases in which the perpetrators use tactics or weapons that are inherently indiscriminate, and cases in which the attack is disproportionate, because it is likely to cause excessive protected civilian casualties and damages to protected objects.
As part of the Israel–Hamas war, the Israel Defense Force (IDF) has used artificial intelligence to rapidly and automatically perform much of the process of determining what to bomb. Israel has greatly expanded the bombing of the Gaza Strip, which in previous wars had been limited by the Israeli Air Force running out of targets.
