I was digging through the Wikileaks Iraq War Logs SQL dump the other day and I found the difference between actual combat casualties and “collateral damage” to be striking and horrifying. Eventually I want to put together a much more elaborate visualization, but I rolled this up in about an hour and it serves the purpose pretty well. The tiny red sliver at the top of the graph is actual enemy combatants killed while the blue at the bottom is our troops killed. The giant yellow portion is civilian casualties and the green is Iraqi citizens that are involved in the war such as police forces and politicians.

The data is extracted from the US Military’s own reports and rolled up in a simple SQL query. The data spans January 2004 through December 2009 and I’ve totaled it into one month intervals. It just goes to show that the troops on either side aren’t the ones bearing the full horror of this war - it is the Iraqi people themselves.

The chart is powered by the wonderful Javascript Infovis Toolkit and you can mouse over any data point to see totals for that month.