Recording casualties during a conflict can provide a body of evidence of how violence has affected particular communities or groups, such as the Yazidis in Iraq and the Kurds in Syria. When the Islamic State entered Iraq in 2014, they immediately started committing gross human rights violations and displayed violence of an increasingly sectarian nature against religious and ethnic groups, including Christians and Yazidis.
As a casualty recorder for Iraq Body Count, I documented the brutal killings of civilians daily, as the body count rose from 9,852 in 2013 to 20,218 in 2014.
State of insecurity
But as Pope Francis makes the first papal visit to Iraq, it is important to note that violence against Christians in the troubled country had started years earlier – shortly after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s regime in 2003. The insecurity that followed the power vacuum enabled extremist elements to form deadly groups – such as Al-Qaida in Iraq – to target those that…