Who's Dying in the Iraq War, in Pixels

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This simple pixel diagram displays the human death toll of the Iraq war. Blue pixels are "friendly" deaths (U.S. and coalition forces), green ones are "host" deaths (Iraqi government), gray are "enemy" deaths (insurgents) and orange, well, those are civilians.

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It's interesting to see how the distribution of the causalities changed in the diagram on the right, which shows the deaths as they occurred chronologically, but the one on the left, with the deaths grouped together by category, is even more powerful. As Kamel Makhloufi, the diagram's designer points out, "Just remember that host nation + civilian + enemies = mostly Iraqis." Of course what this diagram doesn't show is who's doing the killing—which deaths are attributed to combat, insurgent attacks, etc. And while it's easy to look at these and say "look at all the civillians getting killed in this war," it's ostensibly that type of non-combat violence that we're now trying to quell.

The data was culled from the documents recently published by WikiLeaks. [Flickr via Infosthetics]

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