Summary
The country whose sanctions-era infant-mortality controversy is the case study of Chapter 6 of Debunking the Genocide Allegations, offered as the precedent for the Humanitarian bias in Gaza reporting (Debunking the Genocide Allegations: A Reexamination of the Israel-Hamas War from October 7, 2023 to June 1, 2025, PDF p.151-162).
Details
- Security Council Resolution 661 (August 1990) prohibited all member-state trade with Iraq except for strictly medical or humanitarian purposes and foodstuffs in humanitarian circumstances; after Iraq’s surrender in April 1991 the food-import ban was lifted but other sanctions remained, conditioned on dismantling its weapons of mass destruction and missile programs, cessation of support for terrorism, border delineation with Kuwait and other issues (PDF p.152).
- The Iraqi Ministry of Health, before the Gulf War the most advanced in the Arab world, with universal health coverage achieved in the 1970s, repeatedly published reports of an escalating humanitarian disaster; by 2003 Dr. Nasheit reported infant mortality rising from 28 per 1,000 to 107 per 1,000, leading to 1,673,942 Iraqi children dead between 1990 and 2003 (PDF p.152).
- Signs of falsification recorded in the work include the population growth rate of 35.8 percent (1977-1987) against 35.1 percent (1987-1997) on the Iraqi government’s own data, and an FAO/WHO report of September 2000 finding a high prevalence of overweight — 67 percent in Baghdad for those aged 25 and over — with heart disease, hypertension and diabetes the major reported adult causes of death (PDF p.160-161).
- Post-2003 UN surveys showed a sharp but limited rise in under-five mortality in 1990-1991, attributed mainly to the suppression of the Shia uprising in the south and the Kurdish uprising in the north, followed by a downward trend; in the Kurdish autonomous region, where interviewees and medical staff were free from regime pressure, child mortality declined after the sharp 1990-1991 increase (PDF p.154-155, p.159).
Related pages
Debunking the Genocide Allegations: A Reexamination of the Israel-Hamas War from October 7, 2023 to June 1, 2025, Saddam Hussein, Oil-for-Food Programme, UNICEF, Sarah Zaidi, Humanitarian bias