Body count in Baghdad up in June
Number of unidentified corpses found on street rises sharply
By Joshua Partlow
Updated: 33 minutes ago
BAGHDAD, July 4 - Nearly five months into a security strategy that involves thousands of additional U.S. and Iraqi troops patrolling Baghdad, the number of unidentified bodies found on the streets of the capital was 41 percent higher in June than in January, according to unofficial Health Ministry statistics.
During the month of June, 453 unidentified corpses, some bound, blindfolded, and bearing signs of torture, were found in Baghdad, according to morgue data provided by a Health Ministry official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to release the information. In January, 321 corpses were discovered in the capital, a total that fell steadily until April but then rose sharply over the last two months, the statistics show.
Overall, the level of violent civilian deaths in Iraq is declining, according to the U.S. military and Health Ministry statistics, and there has been a steady drop in fatalities from mass-casualty bombings that have torn through outdoor markets, university bus stops and crowds assembled to collect food rations.
But the number of unidentified bodies found on the streets is considered a key indicator of the malignancy of sectarian strife. While the declining number of bombing victims suggests that efforts to control violence are showing some success, the daily slayings of individuals, in aggregate, speak to an enduring level of aggression.
‘Cycle of violence’
"That's the cancer that keeps eating the neighborhoods," Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. military commander in Iraq, said at a meeting with reporters Saturday. "It never stops. It's a tit for tat. It's a cycle of violence that has to be broken."
These individual slayings are often attributed to Shiite militias and described as revenge killings or acts of sectarian cleansing in response to catastrophic suicide bombings by the Sunni insurgent group al-Qaeda in Iraq. But such characterizations oversimplify a landscape of violence that includes Sunnis executing individual Shiites, and attackers dispatching their victims for other criminal, personal or political motives.
"I tend to think al-Qaeda is public enemy number one," said Petraeus. "And unfortunately, you know, it's the one that really sort of gave the raison d'etre for militias. It becomes the justification for an awful lot of what is done by the Shia extremists, Shia militias."
One of the main goals of the Baghdad security plan, launched in mid-February as the first of nearly 30,000 additional American soldiers arrived in Iraq, was to halt sectarian murders.
But even before the plan went into effect, the number of bodies discovered had fallen well below the levels of last fall. In October 2006, for instance, 1,782 unidentified bodies were found in Baghdad, according to the United Nations, citing official statistics provided by the Health Ministry.
By January, the total dropped to 321 in the capital, according to the statistics provided to The Washington Post, followed by 294 in February, 272 in March and 182 in April. But the figure spiked upward to 433 in May and 453 last month. A Health Ministry spokesman could not be reached for comment on the statistics despite several attempts.
Difficult to calculate
Calculating the numbers of people who die in Iraq is notoriously difficult because there is no transparent or reliable system for tracking and distributing official estimates. Various ministries keep different statistics on fatalities, and Iraqi government officials planned to meet this week to discuss how to collect and distribute a single set of numbers.
The statistics provided by the Health Ministry official put the number of civilian fatalities in June across Baghdad and other provinces at 2,097, excluding the three that make up the northern Kurdish region, which is more peaceful. This number is 34 percent lower than the 3,190 civilian deaths the ministry recorded in January, but above a low point reached in April, when 1,664 civilians died, according to the official.
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