The state of Iraq as it enters 2008

2007 will be remembered as the year in which the British-based polling agency ORB estimated that 1.2 million Iraqis had been killed under the US occupation, substantiating the death toll previously calculated by scientists working with Johns Hopkins University. It will also go down as the year when more than one million Iraqis were forced to flee their homes to escape the sectarian violence fomented and encouraged by the policies of US imperialism. The “surge” of 30,000 additional US troops to the country between March and June was accompanied by arguably the worst ethnic-communal cleansing in Iraq’s modern history.

UNICEF published statistics on December 21 revealing the level of social destruction: just 28 percent of Iraqi 17-year-olds sat for their final school exams in 2007 while the violence prevented close to one million children from attending primary school.