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Afghanistan deadlier for coalition troops than Iraq: study
Last Updated Thu, 07 Sep 2006 18:42:34 EDT
CBC News

NATO soldiers fighting in Afghanistan face a higher risk of being killed than the U.S.-led international forces that invaded Iraq in 2003, a British statistician says. Sheila Bird, the vice-president of Britain's Royal Statistical Society, said in the Sept. 9 issue of New Scientist magazine that she made the conclusion after analyzing casualty rates and the number of soldiers deployed on each mission.

Bird said the risk to the NATO forces fighting militants in Afghanistan, including more than 2,000 Canadian troops, is approaching the level faced by the then-Soviets, who abandoned their war there in 1989 after 10 years.

Five of the approximately 18,500 soldiers in the NATO's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) have been killed every week since May, she said. That's more than twice the level during the battles to control Iraq, Bird calculated.

"The analysis shows that troops are fighting one of the fiercest campaigns since the Bush administration's 'war on terror' began in 2001," Bird says in an extract from the article that was published early on the magazine's website.
Officials don't give 'true picture' of deaths
More than 18,500 troops from 37 nations make up NATO's deployment in Afghanistan, the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), which took over control of the coalition forces in the summer from the United States. The United States also has about 15,000 soldiers in the country.
Canada alone has lost 32 soldiers in Afghanistan since it deployed troops there in 2002. Twenty-four of those died in 2006: 19 were killed by militants, through roadside bombs, suicide bombers or firefights, while accidents or misdirected fire from allies killed the rest. As well, a diplomat died in a suicide attack. But Bird says in the article that she suspects the casualty figures issued by the U.S., British and Canadian governments "do not give a true picture of the risks coalition forces face, because they do not reveal fatalities as a proportion of the forces deployed."

"The commentary we are getting from politicians about this conflict does not do justice to the threat our forces now face in Afghanistan," she told the magazine. She calculated that for every 1,000 NATO soldiers, 14 were dying each year. Britain, which has about 4,000 troops in Afghanistan, is losing them annually at a rate of 11 per 1,000, she said.

Copyright 2006 Canadian Broadcasting Corporation