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Both sides certainly killed large numbers of each others soldiers and there were extensive civilian casualties involved with bombing campaigns, starvation and so on throughout the war. But your example doesn’t really make sense. It’s more like the US going to war with, say, Iraq, and the regular civilian casualty rate being 2% of the population but somehow 40% of Iraqi Kurds mysteriously die over the course of 5 years. This would indeed imply a particular targeting of that group on an ethnic basis. Of course, there are other potential explanations, but now imagine that the US had spent a decade demonizing Kurds as part of state ideology and a central pillar of its political program. Again, suspicions mount.
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