The COVID pandemic showed that governments can go a long way in recognizing—counting, naming, acknowledging, and memorializing—the dead in mass death events. But COVID also saw governments underplaying, ignoring, and covering up deaths. This pattern also appears in armed conflicts, in which “misinformation, denial and lack of accountability,” write scholars Emily Ward and Lily Hamourtziadou, occur when “states fail to protect civilians during times of conflict.”
Under international law, “there is a legal obligation to identify and record all casualties of armed conflict.” The obligations don’t end with death, as Ward and Hamourtziadou continue:
Customary international humanitarian law calls for the dead to be respected, including a duty to prevent despoiling of graves and ensuring the identification and proper burial of human remains…No human casualty is less important than any other.
In armed conflict, however, mass deaths have more often been recorded strategically. Parties have a stake in minimizing (or maximizing) casualties, particularly civilian casualties. Ward and Hamourtziadou cite then–British Prime Minister David Cameron claiming that “there have been no known civilian casualties” in the battle against ISIS between 2014 and 2018. Noting the legal obligation to document civilian casualties, a former British intelligence official said “no effort was made to do that in Iraq or Afghanistan.”
“We don’t do body counts,” said US General Tommy Franks about US President George W. Bush’s war in Iraq in 2003. An NGO called Iraq Body Count stepped in to fill the breach created by uncaring or unreliable state actors. Twenty-three years after the invasion of Iraq, IBC still reports on the ongoing violence. Documented civilian deaths from violence in that conflict range between 187,499 and 211,046. The total number of deaths, including combatants, is estimated at 300,000. More recently, IBC has also expanded its work to document the genocide in Gaza.
The organization Every Casualty Counts, meanwhile, reports from around the world. A sampling of its data includes the following: 3,720 conflict-related deaths in Northern Ireland (1966–2006); 15,172 deaths after four years of Russia’s war against Ukraine; over 170,000 documented direct deaths in Afghanistan since 2001; more than 300,000 total conflict-related deaths in Syria (2003–2024); and over 1,000,000 conflict-related deaths in Ethiopia since 1935, reflecting nearly a century of crisis that began when that country was invaded by Italy in a brutal colonial war.
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Another example of such non-state record keeping and memorialization is the Bosnian Book of the Dead, a database listing the names of over 95,000 victims of the 1992–1995 conflict in the former Yugoslavia. (A third-party analysis of this data notes that the number should be “seen as an approximation of a minimum and not as the complete total.”)
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Ward and Hamourtziadou argue for the critical importance of documenting the casualties of armed conflict. This is not only for the purposes of truth, accountability, justice, and reconciliation. Documenting war crimes and crimes against humanity is vital, but the point isn’t just statistical. Equally important is the necessity of honoring victims by remembering them, by giving them their names back. “Names, not numbers. People, not collateral,” as the slogan of Every Casualty Counts has it.
“The restoration of the humanity of the victims,” write Ward and Hamourtziadou, is precisely the point in the face of the inhumanity of killing. Othering victims—by ethnicity, race, religion, nationality, or other characteristics—is typically used by those who kill them to deny their humanity and attempt to erase them from memory. Countering that erasure, determining what happened to the “missing,” and individualizing those who make up the “mass” in mass graves—all these are essential “for states and for their citizens.”
