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Over 3,400 Iraqi Civilians Killed in July



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By EDWARD WONG and DAMIEN CAVE
Published: August 15, 2006

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Aug. 15 — More Iraqi civilians were killed in July than in apparently any other month of the war, according to Iraqi Health Ministry and morgue statistics, despite a security plan begun by the new government in June.


An average of more than 110 Iraqis were killed per day in July, according to figures from the Health Ministry and the Baghdad morgue. At least 3,438 civilians died violently that month, a 9 percent increase over the tally in June and nearly twice as many as in January.

The Baghdad security plan started by Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki on June 14 was much praised by top Iraqi and American officials at the time. It 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 American military to add soldiers to the capital and back away from proposals for a troop drawdown by the year’s end.

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 American ambassador said in an interview that Iraq’s political leaders have failed to fully use their influence to rein in the soaring violence, and that people associated with the government are 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,” the ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, said.

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, despite earlier efforts to turn security over to the Iraqis more quickly. The American command has added nearly 4,000 American soldiers to Baghdad by extending the tour of a combat brigade.

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 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 obtained by the United Nations, 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 H. 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 United Nations 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 news media drastically underreport the level of violence in Iraq. The United States government and military have declined to release any overall figures on Iraqi civilian casualties and have not even said 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, Ambassador Khalilzad and the top generals have warned that the country could slide toward 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, Mr. Khalilzad said in a recent interview at his home. “I believe that there have been forces associated with people in the government from both the Shia and Sunni sides that have participated in this,” he said of the violence.

“I think both the leadership of the Shia movement parties and the leadership of the Sunni parties have a lot more influence than they have exercised so far to affect the situation,” he added. “I think they need to come together if they’re serious about avoiding broader sectarian war and to talk honestly to each other about what is it that divides them.”

But the Iraqi politicians are furiously lashing out at each other. The first major crack in the fragile unity government appeared on Monday, when the speaker of Parliament, a conservative Sunni Arab, said in an interview that he was considering stepping down because of animosity from the Kurdish and Shiite political blocs.

The speaker, Mahmoud al-Mashhadani, the third-ranking official in Iraq, belongs to the main Sunni Arab political bloc, which holds 44 of 275 seats in Parliament.

The move to oust Mr. Mashhadani appears to have thrown the Sunnis’ Iraqi Consensus Front into disarray. Today, Khalaf al-Elayan, a senior member of the bloc, said on an Iraqi television network that the bloc rejected any call for Mashhadani’s resignation. Another Sunni leader, Adnan al-Dulaimi, said in a telephone interview that Mr. Mashhadani should step down. Mr. Dulaimi is considered a possible replacement for Mr. Mashhadani.

Against this backdrop of political disorder, violence has continued apace.

In the southern city of Karbala today, Shiite gunmen and Iraqi military forces exchanged shots for several hours near one of Iraq’s holiest Shiite shrines. Witnesses said the fighting forced the Iraqi army to block entrances to the city and impose a curfew, prohibiting all cars from the streets and warning residents not to carry guns even if they had the proper permits.

In the northern city of Mosul, a suicide bomber detonated a truckful of explosives, killing at least five civilians and wounded nearly 50 near the offices of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, the party of President Jalal Talabani.

One of the deadliest attacks in recent weeks took place in southern Baghdad on Sunday night, when bombs, mortars and rockets killed at least 57 people near a market in a Shiite neighborhood, according to Iraqi officials. The American military said today that the death toll had grown to at least 63 Iraqis and that the cause had been identified: two car bombs that ignited a gas line.

In total, the military said, four car bombs exploded in a 30-minute period within a radius of less than two miles, destroying four buildings and 20 shops.

A day earlier, Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, the American military spokesman, told reporters in Baghdad that the Iraqi deaths were due solely to a gas main explosion and not to any attack. Iraqi security officials denounced his statements at the time.

Lt. Col. Barry Johnson, a spokesman for the military, said that General Caldwell based his earlier conclusion on “incomplete information.” He said the initial report attributed the unusually destructive nature of the explosion to gas, though it did not explain how it ignited.

“We recognize that this has caused a good deal of confusion and reinforces why we are normally so cautious to gather all the facts before releasing parts of what we know,” Colonel Johnson said.

The well-organized attack on Sunday came despite the fact that American and Iraqi troops have flooded areas of southern Baghdad as part of the new security plan. The combined operation has focused most visibly on regulating traffic at checkpoints and searching for weapons at every home and building in troubled areas.

The American military said today that Dawra, the first area searched, was being sealed off with concrete barriers and blast walls. All vehicles coming or going through a handful of entry points would be searched, said a statement from the military. It added that the number of roadside bombs found in the area each week since the operation started Aug. 7 has decreased to 4 from 25.

Military officials have also ramped up efforts to restore public faith in Iraq’s security forces, after various men in uniform had been seen kidnapping and killing. On Monday, Maj. Gen. Joseph Peterson, who heads the Iraqi police training program, unveiled a new uniform for Iraq’s commando-style police units. He said that the new bluish-gray fatigues, with the Iraqi flag sewn into the fabric’s print, would be hard for criminals to copy. There was no guarantee, however, that the new uniforms would solve the problem.

Some police recruits, he said, “still have allegiances and are in fact working with their militias.”