The Times reports: “A new study by public health researchers estimates that up to 600,000 Iraqi people — nearly 1 in 40 — have died violently since the US-led invasion of the country in March 2003.”
Aside from the dismal standard of English in this news article, which goes on to say that the error margin means that the figure could lie anywhere between 426,369 to 793,663, which is not at all the same as “up to 600,000”, I struggled to grasp what such a huge figure might mean and for a context.
For comparison, in the six years of World War Two the United Kingdom lost 382,600 military personnel and 67,800 civilians, making a total of 450,400 deaths. These deaths amounted to 0.94% of the UK population.
Source: Wikipedia
Words fail me.
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