July deadliest month in Iraq, tallies show By Edward Wong and Damien Cave The New York Times WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 16, 2006
BAGHDAD More Iraqi civilians appear to have been killed in July than in any other month of the war, according to national and morgue statistics, suggesting that the much-vaunted Baghdad security plan started in June by the new government had failed.
An average of more than 110 Iraqis were killed per day in July, according to figures from Iraq's Health Ministry and the Baghdad morgue. At least 3,438 civilians died violently that month, a 9 percent increase over the total in June and nearly twice as many as in January.
The rising numbers indicate that sectarian violence is spiraling out of control, and reinforce an assertion that many senior Iraqi officials and American military analysts have been making in recent months - that the country is already embroiled in a civil war, with the U.S.-led forces caught between Sunni Arab guerrillas and Shiite militias.
The numbers also provide the first definitive evidence that the Baghdad security plan, started by Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki on June 14, has done virtually nothing to quell the violence. The plan, much touted by top Iraqi and U.S. officials at the time, relied on setting up more Iraqi-run checkpoints to stymie insurgent movement.
Those officials have since acknowledged that the plan has fallen far short of its aims, forcing the U.S. military to add soldiers to the capital and back away from proposals for a troop draw- down by the end of the year.
The Baghdad morgue reported receiving 1,855 bodies in July, more than half of the total deaths recorded in the country. The morgue tally for July was an 18 percent increase over June.
The U.S. ambassador said in an interview that Iraq's political leaders had failed to fully use their influence to rein in the soaring violence, and that people associated with the government were stoking the flames of sectarian hatred.
"I think the time has come for these leaders to take responsibility with regards to sectarian violence, to the security of Baghdad at the present time," said the ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad.
The American military in recent weeks has been especially eager to prove that Baghdad can be tamed if American troops are added to the streets and take a more active role - in effect, a repudiation of earlier efforts to turn over security more quickly to Iraqis. The U.S. command has added nearly 4,000 U.S. soldiers to Baghdad by extending the tour of a combat brigade.
Under a new security plan aimed at overhauling Maliki's failed efforts, some of the city's most violent southern and western areas are now virtually occupied block-to-block by American and Iraqi forces, with entire neighborhoods transformed into miniature police states after being sealed off by blast walls and concertina wire.
When the July tally for total civilian deaths is added to Iraqi government numbers for earlier months, the total indicates that at least 17,776 Iraqi civilians died violently in the first seven months of this year, or an average of 2,539 per month.
The Health Ministry did not provide figures for people wounded by attacks in Baghdad but said that at least 3,597 Iraqis were injured outside the capital in July, a 25 percent increase over June.
United Nations officials and military analysts say the morgue and ministry numbers almost certainly reflect severe undercounts, caused by the haphazard nature of information in a war zone.
Many casualties in areas outside Baghdad probably never appear in the official count, said Anthony Cordesman, a military analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. That helps explain why fatalities in Baghdad appear to account for such a large percentage of the total number, he said in a recent report.
The UN has been tracking civilian casualty figures by collating numbers from the Health Ministry and Baghdad morgue. Last month, it announced that the Iraqi government's numbers indicated that 3,149 violent deaths had occurred in June, or an average of more than 100 per day.
The statistics indicate that the news media drastically underreports the level of violence in Iraq. The U.S. government and military have declined to release any overall figures on Iraqi civilian casualties or even say whether they are keeping count.
Wide-scale sectarian violence erupted after the Feb. 22 bombing of a sacred Shiite shrine in the town of Samarra and has only gotten worse since, with militias and death squads on both sides of the centuries-old Sunni-Shiite divide engaged in reprisal killings.
In recent weeks, Khalilzad and the top generals have warned that the country could slide into full-blown civil war, especially if the capital continues fragmenting into ethnic or sectarian enclaves controlled by militias, as has been happening for months. Much of the responsibility rests on Iraqi politicians, many of whom have ties to militias, Khalilzad said.
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