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GUEST: Dahlia Wasfi, Iraqi American activist, medical student, and speaker for Global Exchange

A survey carried out by Iraqi physicians and overseen by American academics at Johns Hopkins University and MIT, estimated recently that 655,000 more people have died in Iraq since US-led forces invaded in March 2003. In the year ending June 2006, the team calculated Iraq’s mortality rate to be roughly four times what it was the year before the war with a steady increase in mortality since the invasion. Of the 655,000 dead, 54,000 were killed by disease and other causes relating to a health care system in dire condition. According to the Iraqi Health Ministry, as of October 2005 25% of Iraq’s 18,000 physicians had left the country since the 2003 US invasion. According to one Iraqi physician, Dr Majeed al-Naomi, “healthcare in Iraq since 2003 is worse than during the sanctions. At that time we had little equipment and medicine, but in the last three years we have lost almost all the specialists.” Additionally, doctors and other health workers are attacked, shot at, threatened, kidnapped, and told to “leave the country or die”. Doctors have also been targeted by government death squads and US military. Meanwhile, health workers in Iraq have been on strike for higher wages over the past month across several areas of the country.

Visit Dahlia Wasfi’s website at www.liberatethis.com.