Young faces of an old war: Unearthed photos of the Korean War show what the three-year conflict really looked like

Check out Life magazine to see the photos.

From Daily Mail Online: Young faces of an old war: Unearthed photos of the Korean War show what the three-year conflict really looked like
The formal end of the war in Iraq earlier this month brings nine years of fighting in the country to a close. The images of war for much of the past decade have been largely filled with the sand of the Middle East.

But because of recently-released photos of the Korean War, the public can now visit a past battlefield from the past.

LIFE magazine published a collection of never-before-seen photos from the front lines of the three-year conflict that resulted in around 700,000 deaths.

Tensions in the region lingered after the Cold War, and the peninsula was divided on the 38th parallel.

The North turned Communist in 1948- which they have remained since- and the emotional and philosophical conflicts between the two countries turned physical on June 25, 1950.

In keeping with existing treaties that said that the United Nations would defend the South if they were attacked, and China and America were the biggest contributors of troops.

As a result, America- and all of the allies- paid a high toll for the fight in terms of human life. They lost 36,516 troops by the year the war ended in 1953.

The United Kingdom was the only European contributor and they lost 1,109 troops. Nearby Turkey lost 721 troops and the Canadians lost 516 troops. Australia

The biggest ally victim was China who LIFE estimates lost anywhere between 200,000 and 400,000 soldiers during the conflict.

Of those directly involved in the conflict, the North had more fatalities than the South, with each country loosing 215,000 and 137,899 respectively.

Many of the shots released by LIFE were done by the magazine's star photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White.

Ms Bourke-White was the magazine's first female journalist and her photo was the one that graced the inaugural issue in 1936.

In a rare move, one of the pictures even shows Ms Bourke-White interacting with her subjects, giving the viewer a sense of what the relationships on the front lines were really like.