AUB professor of medical anthropology and public health, Omar Dewachi, was among a team of researchers who studied the cost of wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan on the United States, which was the subject of the Eisenhower Research Project based at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies.

According to the report, whose findings were released by Reuters on June 29, 2011, a decade after the War on Terror was launched, the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan have killed at least 225,000 people, including men and women in uniform, contractors, and civilians. The wars have cost Americans between $3.2 and $4 trillion, including medical care and disability for current and future war veterans. If the wars continue, they could burden the Pentagon with another $450 billion in spending by 2020.

Involving more than 20 economists, anthropologists, lawyers, humanitarian personnel, and political scientists, the Cost of War project provides new estimates of the total war cost as well as other direct and indirect human and economic costs of the U.S. military response to the 9/11 attacks, said Reuters.

Dewachi’s work contributed to presenting the effects of the 12-year sanctions and the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 on the deterioration of the Iraqi health system and migration of health professionals. He further highlighted the effects of the American intervention on the displacement of millions of Iraqis both inside and outside Iraq; their precarious living conditions; as well as how such displacement reconfigured the ethnic and religious composition of neighborhoods in cities around the country.

“The project is the first comprehensive analysis of all U.S., coalition, and civilian casualties, including U.S. contractors,” said the Reuters release. “It also assesses many of the wars’ hidden costs, such as interest on war-related debt and veterans’ benefits.”