US Sanctions Did Not Kill 500,000 Iraqi Children

The Misbar team investigated the claim and found it to be false. The claim is based on the Iraq Child and Maternal Mortality Survey, conducted in 1999 by UNICEF in collaboration with the Iraq Ministry of Health (ICMMS). According to the study, over half a million children under the age of five died as a direct result of Iraq's economic sanctions. This figure has been frequently cited in the media.

However, the British Medical Journal (BMJ) published a study in 2017 claiming that the UNICEF study's findings were exaggerated. The study was described as "rigged" and "an especially masterful fraud" by the British Medical Journal. According to the BMJ, when comparing the child mortality rate before and after the sanctions, the rate in the period 1995–2000 was around 40 per 1000, indicating that there was no significant increase in child mortality in Iraq after the sanctions were implemented. Another Relief Web study estimated mortality from malnutrition data, puts the number of deaths at just over "100,000 excess deaths among Iraqis under the age of five from August 1990 to March 1998."

Following criticism of the reported figures, UNICEF issued a press release stating that "the surveys were never intended to provide an absolute figure of how many children have died in Iraq as a result of sanctions." Rather, they show that if the substantial reductions in child mortality in Iraq during the 1980s had continued through the 1990s—that is, if there had not been two wars if sanctions had not been imposed, and if investment in social services had been maintained—there would have been 500,000 fewer deaths of children under the age of five.'

Sanctions opponents accepted the figure of over 500,000 without question. According to some researchers, there are inconsistencies, errors, and limitations in the data, as well as a wide variation in child mortality rates across Iraq's regions. They also state that, given the dictatorial Iraqi government's collaboration at the time, the tool was used for propaganda and to exaggerate the effects of the sanctions on the country in order to pressure the international community to end them.

However, despite the fact that economic sanctions mainly target civilians rather than dictatorial regimes, the figures that over 500,000 children under the age of five died as a result of the sanctions on Iraq are false.