Death Tolls of the Iran-Iraq War

CHARLES KURZMAN

The Iran-Iraq War of 1980-1988 scarred both countries deeply, with horrific fighting at the battlefront and long-range missile attacks on cities.

But postwar censuses in Iran and Iraq suggest that the war’s death toll may not be nearly as high as is commonly thought.

The war is often said to have caused half a million or more deaths. The Battle Deaths Dataset, developed by a team of political scientists, estimates fatalities at more than 600,000. The Correlates of War Project, another major scholarly dataset, estimates 500,000 Iraqi dead and 750,000 Iranian dead.

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