How much is a life worth? A decade of war in Afghanistan has left a legacy of death and destruction for the Afghan people, often at the hands of U.S. forces. Attaching a dollar figure to that suffering may be difficult, but that’s precisely what the U.S. military has done.
The Intercept obtained records for thousands of compensation payments made by the U.S. between 2003 and 2013. Some are “condolence payments” for innocents killed or injured in combat operations, while others are for a wide variety of damages — a child’s bicycle run over, an onion field crushed, twenty-one sheep killed in rocket fire. The payments presented here are not a comprehensive accounting of the U.S. presence in Afghanistan, but scrolling through these mundane indignities can offer a small window into thousands of fractured lives and personal tragedies.
Because the data is incomplete, this graphic includes only a selection of the records we obtained. For more, see our accompanying story.