When King Faisal I was crowned to be the first King of Modern Iraq in 1921 he endeavoured to encourage the Iraqi people, despite their different lineages, to feel, behave and think as united Iraqis. This was depicted in the formation of all the major licensed and secret political parties, such as the Iraqi communist Party, the National Democratic Party, the Baath Party and others seeing as they all included Arabs, Kurds, Turcoman, Sunnis, Shiites, Christians, Sabians and even Jews. Until the establishment of the Kurdistan Democratic Party in 1946, there was no major sectarian or a one component party, and if they existed as secret ones they were with no major influence among the people or in Iraqi politics. Regardless of the Western media depictions of Iraq as a collection of people dominated by one sect that marginalized the others, this was Iraq’s reality until 2025.
“Roughly” 500,000 children in the early 1990s? “About” a million people killed by the invasion and its aftermath? “A few million” more lives maimed, displaced, wrecked (as much by grief and despair as by physical mutilation)? Such statistics are terribly abstract, obscenely abstract: an adding-machine tabulates an endless list of corpses into an abstract figure to be entered in the chronicle of “collateral damage,” “civilian casualties,”—or a “body count.”