A recent study has found that wars instigated by the United States and its allies – including Belgium – following the 9/11 terrorist attacks caused the deaths of up to 4.6 million people.
The study, which was conducted by the Costs of War project at Brown University, offers a harrowing account of the "devastating" death and destruction these "post-9/11 wars" inflicted on countries in Africa, the Middle-East, and South Asia since 2001.
"The total death toll in the post-9/11 war zones of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen could be at least 4.5-4.6 million and counting, though the precise mortality figure remains unknown," the report noted.
It added that the vast majority (3.6-3.7 million) of these casualties were "indirect deaths", in which people were not killed directly in the fighting but rather as a consequence of the "wars' destruction of economies, public services, and the environment".
It also emphasised that "women and children suffer the brunt of these ongoing impacts", and that 7.6 million children in the aforementioned war-torn nations are currently suffering from acute malnutrition (or "wasting"), more than half of whom (3.9 million) are in Afghanistan.
The aftermath of an air strike in the village of Hajar Aukaish, Yemen, in 2015. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Although the report is careful to emphasise that it "does not focus on attributing responsibility to warring parties over others", it also explicitly notes that "all warring parties must be held responsible" for the harm caused – implying that Belgium, which participated in nearly all of these conflicts, bears responsibility for many of these deaths.
In particular, Belgium was a member of the NATO coalition which occupied Afghanistan until 2021: a war which, according to the methodology used by the study, caused the deaths of 880,000 people – a number which includes 1,600 children who died in 2021 alone as a result of unexploded ordnance dropped by NATO and other warring parties.
Furthermore, Belgium participated in the devastating NATO air campaign in Libya in 2011 as well as the subsequent US-led bombing campaign against the Islamic State (ISIS) in Iraq and Syria.
In addition, Belgian arms manufacturers reportedly sold weapons to Saudi Arabia from 2015 to 2020, when the Gulf state led a brutal air campaign in Yemen which reportedly killed hundreds of thousands of people and left millions more on the brink of starvation.
'Belgium is never engaged alone'
Contacted by The Brussels Times, the Belgian Defence Ministry emphasised that Belgium was never the sole participant in any of these conflicts and claimed – despite voluminous evidence to the contrary – that none of its actions violated international humanitarian law.
"Belgium is never engaged alone, it is always within NATO, Europe, the UN or a coalition," a spokesperson for the Defence Ministry said.
"The Belgian military scrupulously respects international humanitarian law and applies the necessary measures for the use of force in and outside densely populated areas," it added. "It is transparently [possible] for the Belgian authorities to investigate possible incidents."
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Notably, the Defence Ministry failed to respond to another direct question from The Brussels Times regarding its assessment of one of the report's key conclusions, namely, that these conflicts' catastrophic long-term impact makes reparations by the warring parties morally necessary.
"The report's numbers – 4.5-4.6 million people dead in these wars and 7.6 million children experiencing wasting – convey the scale of the suffering in order to raise awareness of the reverberating effects of the wars and the urgent need to mitigate the damage," the report noted.
It added: "These wars are ongoing for millions around the world who are living with and dying from their effects. Reparations, though not easy or cheap, are imperative."
Arguably, the report's findings bring to mind a quote by the late foreign correspondent Robert Fisk. "War is primarily not about victory or defeat," he wrote. "It is about death, and the infliction of death. It represents the total failure of the human spirit."
