How many people died during the Invasion of Iran?
Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran
The Iranian army was armed with the vz. 24 rifle, a Czech version of the German Mauser. Iran had bought 100 FT-6 and Panzer 38(t) light tanks and additional LaFrance TK-6 armoured cars, enough to outfit their 1st and 2nd divisions. Further Iranian orders had been delayed by World War II. While it was a large order and they were excellent tanks, they were not enough to defeat a multi-front invasion by two great powers. The changing nature of tank warfare in the 1930s made all but 50 of them obsolete when the invasion began. Prior to the attack, the RAF dropped leaflets on Iranian troops, asking them not to fight and to understand their country was "not threatened" as it was being "liberated" from possible Nazi destruction.
The Iranians had little time to organise a defence, as the Allies achieved a tactical surprise. The war began in the early morning hours of 25 August, when RAF aircraft entered Iranian airspace. They bombed targets in the cities of Tehran and Qazvin and various other towns and dropped leaflets urging the Iranians to surrender. The Soviets bombed targets in cities such as Tabriz, Ardabil and Rasht. Civilian and residential areas were hit, and several hundred people were killed and wounded. Reza Shah refused requests by his generals to destroy the road and transportation networks, largely because he did not want to damage the infrastructure that he had painstakingly built during his reign. That contributed to the speedy victory of the Allies.
Casualties of the Iraq War
Burnham, Edward J. Mills, and Frederick M. Burkle noted that the IFHS's data indicated that Iraqi mortality increased by a factor of 1.9 following the invasion, compared to the factor of 2.4 found by Burnham et al., which translates to some 433,000 excess Iraqi deaths (violent and non-violent). Timothy R. Gulden considered it implausible that fewer than one-third of these excess deaths would have been violent in nature. Francisco J. Luquero and Rebecca F. Grais argued that the IFHS's lengthy survey and use of IBC data as a proxy for particularly dangerous areas likely resulted in an underestimate of violent mortality, while Gulden hypothesized that respondents may have been reluctant to report violent deaths to researchers working with the Iraqi government. In a similar vein, Tirman observed that the Iraqi Health Ministry was affiliated with Shi'ite sectarians at the time, remarking that there was evidence that many violent deaths may have been recategorized as "non-violent" to avoid government retribution: "For example, the number of deaths by auto accidents rose by four times the pre-invasion rate; had this single figure been included in the violent deaths category, the overall estimate would have risen to 196,000." Gulden even commented that "the IFHS results are easily in line with the finding of more than 600,000 violent deaths in the study by Burnham et al." However, the authors of the IFHS rejected such claims: "Because the level of underreporting is almost certainly higher for deaths in earlier time periods, we did not attempt to estimate excess deaths. The excess deaths reported by Burnham et al. included only 8.2% of deaths from nonviolent causes, so inclusion of these deaths will not increase the agreement between the estimates from the IFHS and Burnham et al."