Team Infidel
Forum Spin Doctor
New York Times
January 3, 2007
By Associated Press
BAGHDAD, Jan. 2 — Iraq reported Tuesday that about 12,000 civilians were killed last year — the third full year since the American-led invasion — with a sharp rise in the last three months, when 5,000 died.
Only about half as many Iraqi soldiers died in 2006 as American troops. But the number of Iraqi security forces killed jumped to 1,539, nearly double the American death count of 823 for the year, when the deaths of police officers are added to the number of slain Iraqi soldiers.
The Iraqi Health, Defense and Interior Ministries reported that 13,896 Iraqi civilians, police officers and soldiers died last year, 162 more than the tally kept by The Associated Press.
The A.P. count, assembled from its daily news reports, was always believed to be substantially lower than the actual number of deaths because the news agency does not have daily access to official accounting by the Iraqi ministries.
Counts of Iraqi deaths kept by other groups, including the United Nations, list far higher death tolls, which are disputed by the Iraqi government.
While the United States government and military provide no death totals for Iraqis, the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq does keep a count based on reports it gathers from the Baghdad morgue, the Ministry of Health and the Medico-Legal Institute.
The figures for November and December are not yet available from the United Nations, but as of the end of October the organization had reported 26,782 deaths in the first 10 months of 2006.
The United Nations has said that Iraq’s heavily armed Shiite militias are gaining strength and influence and that torture is rampant, despite the government’s vow to reduce human rights abuses.
“Hundreds of bodies continued to appear in different areas of Baghdad — handcuffed, blindfolded and bearing signs of torture and execution-style killing,” the most recent United Nations report said.
The two primary militias in Iraq are the military wings of the country’s strongest Shiite political groups, on which Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki is heavily dependent. Mr. Maliki has repeatedly rejected American demands that he disband the heavily armed groups, especially the Mahdi Army of the radical anti-American cleric Moktada al-Sadr.
“I think the type of violence is different in the past few months,” Gianni Magazzeni, the United Nations mission chief in Baghdad, said when its report was issued in late November. “There was a great increase in sectarian violence, in activities by terrorists and insurgents, but also by militias and criminal gangs.”
He noted that religious clashes had been common since Sunni Arab insurgents bombed a major Shiite shrine last February in Samarra, north of Baghdad.
The United Nations’ human rights office in Iraq continues to receive reports that Iraqi police units and security forces have either been infiltrated by militias or act in collusion with them, the report said.
It said that while sectarian violence is the main cause of civilian deaths, Iraqis also continue to be the victims of terrorism, roadside bombs and drive-by shootings. Others have been caught in the cross-fire between rival gangs.
Last year, a team of American and Iraqi public health researchers for the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health estimated that 600,000 civilians had died in violence from the 2003 American invasion until last summer, the highest estimate at the time for the toll of the war.
But it was an estimate and not a precise count, and researchers acknowledged a margin of error that ranged from 426,369 to 793,663 deaths. The study used samples of casualties from Iraqi households to extrapolate an overall figure of 601,027 Iraqis dead from violence between March 2003 and July 2006.
Researchers came up with the figures after surveying 1,849 Iraqi families in 47 different neighborhoods across Iraq. The selection of geographical areas in 18 regions across Iraq was based on population size, not on the level of violence, they said.
The American and Iraqi governments, as well as other groups, including the Iraq Body Count, an organization that conducts its own surveys, disputed the validity of the study’s findings.
January 3, 2007
By Associated Press
BAGHDAD, Jan. 2 — Iraq reported Tuesday that about 12,000 civilians were killed last year — the third full year since the American-led invasion — with a sharp rise in the last three months, when 5,000 died.
Only about half as many Iraqi soldiers died in 2006 as American troops. But the number of Iraqi security forces killed jumped to 1,539, nearly double the American death count of 823 for the year, when the deaths of police officers are added to the number of slain Iraqi soldiers.
The Iraqi Health, Defense and Interior Ministries reported that 13,896 Iraqi civilians, police officers and soldiers died last year, 162 more than the tally kept by The Associated Press.
The A.P. count, assembled from its daily news reports, was always believed to be substantially lower than the actual number of deaths because the news agency does not have daily access to official accounting by the Iraqi ministries.
Counts of Iraqi deaths kept by other groups, including the United Nations, list far higher death tolls, which are disputed by the Iraqi government.
While the United States government and military provide no death totals for Iraqis, the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq does keep a count based on reports it gathers from the Baghdad morgue, the Ministry of Health and the Medico-Legal Institute.
The figures for November and December are not yet available from the United Nations, but as of the end of October the organization had reported 26,782 deaths in the first 10 months of 2006.
The United Nations has said that Iraq’s heavily armed Shiite militias are gaining strength and influence and that torture is rampant, despite the government’s vow to reduce human rights abuses.
“Hundreds of bodies continued to appear in different areas of Baghdad — handcuffed, blindfolded and bearing signs of torture and execution-style killing,” the most recent United Nations report said.
The two primary militias in Iraq are the military wings of the country’s strongest Shiite political groups, on which Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki is heavily dependent. Mr. Maliki has repeatedly rejected American demands that he disband the heavily armed groups, especially the Mahdi Army of the radical anti-American cleric Moktada al-Sadr.
“I think the type of violence is different in the past few months,” Gianni Magazzeni, the United Nations mission chief in Baghdad, said when its report was issued in late November. “There was a great increase in sectarian violence, in activities by terrorists and insurgents, but also by militias and criminal gangs.”
He noted that religious clashes had been common since Sunni Arab insurgents bombed a major Shiite shrine last February in Samarra, north of Baghdad.
The United Nations’ human rights office in Iraq continues to receive reports that Iraqi police units and security forces have either been infiltrated by militias or act in collusion with them, the report said.
It said that while sectarian violence is the main cause of civilian deaths, Iraqis also continue to be the victims of terrorism, roadside bombs and drive-by shootings. Others have been caught in the cross-fire between rival gangs.
Last year, a team of American and Iraqi public health researchers for the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health estimated that 600,000 civilians had died in violence from the 2003 American invasion until last summer, the highest estimate at the time for the toll of the war.
But it was an estimate and not a precise count, and researchers acknowledged a margin of error that ranged from 426,369 to 793,663 deaths. The study used samples of casualties from Iraqi households to extrapolate an overall figure of 601,027 Iraqis dead from violence between March 2003 and July 2006.
Researchers came up with the figures after surveying 1,849 Iraqi families in 47 different neighborhoods across Iraq. The selection of geographical areas in 18 regions across Iraq was based on population size, not on the level of violence, they said.
The American and Iraqi governments, as well as other groups, including the Iraq Body Count, an organization that conducts its own surveys, disputed the validity of the study’s findings.