The government has issued a new tabulation of war dead that differs only very modestly from the figures issued 14 years ago.
It says that 190,000 combat personnel were killed during the war—a number consistent with previous figures although very different from the million war dead frequently cited in the Western media.
In October 2000, the Martyrs Foundation said the number of combat dead from the 1980-88 war with Iraq totaled 188,015. The new figure is just a half percent higher, not a statistically significant difference. The new figure was published by the Organization for Safekeeping and Publishing the Values of the Holy Defense.
The group also published figures showing that the overall burden of the war fell on the Basij, which is comprised largely of young boys and old men, rather than on the regular Army or the Pasdaran. The following are the total numbers serving during the eight-year war:
200,000 Pasdaran & police
217,000 Regular forces
2,130,000 Basij
That means 84 percent of the war’s fighters were in the Basij. The numbers for the Pasdaran and the regular armed forces are exceedingly low for a war that lasted eight years and therefore had a large turnover in military personnel. The figures reveal a stunning dependence on boys and older men.
The figures published in 2000 said 17,000 civilians were also killed during the war, bringing the total death toll to 205,000. No breakdown was released to show how many civilians were residents of the border combat zones and how many died from the Iraqi air raids and missile attacks on Iran’s cities.
The statistics published in 2000 were significantly higher that the figures released by then-Culture Minister Mohammad Khatami in September 1988, just weeks after the war’s end. No death tolls were announced during the war.
Some changes were obviously justified since the remains of so many missing men were only recovered from battlefields long after the war. However, no explanation was given for why the toll of civilians killed rose 52 percent from 11,000 in 1988 to 16,780 in 2000.
The 2000 figures for the first time revealed that 43 percent of the uniformed dead were members of the Basij, reflecting what was known to be a costly policy of signing up youths to be “minefield fodder” by leading deadly charges across Iraqi minefields into the teeth of Iraqi defenses.
The 2000 report said 44 percent of those who died were aged 16-20, 30 percent were aged 21-25 and 8 percent were aged 26-30, which left 18 percent either under 16 or over 30. The lumping together of the under 16 and over 30 group prevents any calculation of the losses of children up to 15.
When Khatami released casualty figures in 1988, he lumped the Basiji dead in with the parent organization, the Pasdaran. Here is a comparison of the 1988 and 2000 figures, showing the percentages of uniformed war dead by organization:
1988 2000
Pasdar 64.7% 19%
Basij — 43
Regulars 28.5 23
Police 5.1 2.8
Const Jihad 1.7 1.2
TOTAL 100% 89%
The 2000 percentages do not add up to 100 percent and there was no explanation for the missing 11 percent. But both sets of percentages agree that almost two-thirds of the uniformed war dead were from the ranks of the revolutionary military forces created as a rival for the regular military, which comprised only about a quarter of the war dead.
The 2000 figures, however, showed that more men in the regular armed forces died than those in the Pasdaran. The Pasdaran’s descriptions of the war, however, would lead one to believe that it saw far more combat than the regular armed forces.
The figures did not reveal how many died in each year of the war. Many critics of the decision to continue the war for six years after the Iraqis were ejected from Iranian territory assert that more people died trying to conquer Iraq than to defend Iran.
According to Khatami in 1988, 123,220 uniformed personnel died in the war. Tens of thousands of others were missing. After the war and up through 2000, more than 45,000 remains were recovered from the battlefields, which would logically make for a total of uniformed dead of around 168,000. But the Martyrs Foundation said 188,015 uniformed troops died. It did not explain why its total was 20,000 more than the sum of Khatami’s 1988 figure plus the official number of recovered remains.
Khatami said 60,711 were listed as missing at the end of the war. The Martyrs Foundation listed no one as missing. If Khatami’s figures for uniformed dead and missing are summed, the total comes to 183,931, close to the Martyrs Foundation figure of 188,015 uniformed personnel declared dead.
Since 2000, around 2,000 more remains have been found.
The official death toll—whether from 1988, 2000 or 2014—is actually small when compared to the major wars of the 20th Century, few of which approached the Iran-Iraq war in length.
Military analysts, however, point out that the Iran-Iraq war was fought episodically. “The last half-dozen years, Iran was launching only one major offensive and a half-dozen lesser offensives each half-year,” one American analyst said. “On the majority of days, there were only minor skirmishes with few casualties.”
About 750,000 troops died on both sides in the American Civil War when the US and Confederate population was roughly the same as Iran’s during the Iran-iraq war. The US Civil War lasted four years to the month while the Iran-Iraq lasted eight years to the month. The US Civil War was also fought episodically
The four-year-long World War I was an especially bloody war for Europe. The four major powers then had populations of about 50 million each. They had the following death tolls: Italy 650,000; Britain 908,000; France 1.4 million; and Germany 1.8 million. Russia, with a larger population, suffered 1.7 million combat dead in World War I.