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Civilians bearing brunt of Iraq violence
(AP)
Updated: 2006-03-03 08:50
Figures in major attacks often vary widely, with police spokesmen giving
different figures to different Iraqi and international news organizations. In
some cases, Interior Ministry death counts in major car bombings are different
from the totals provided up the chain of command by subordinate police
units.
In some cases the discrepancy is a result of the difficulty in counting
bodies ripped apart by fierce explosions. In others, politicians may be
inflating figures to draw attention to the suffering of their community.
If tallies are standardized days later, news organizations have moved on to
reporting other violence and may be unaware that early figures have been
adjusted.
An Associated Press count from April 28, when the current government took
office, through December 2005 found that at least 3,375 Iraqi civilians and at
least 1,561 Iraqi security personnel were killed.
The Brookings Institution estimates that between 5,696 and 9,934 civilians
were killed in Iraq during all of 2005. Brookings estimates at least 2,569 Iraqi
military and police were killed during the year, based on a monthly count by a
Web site, icasualties.org.
Regardless of the precise figures, virtually all studies agree that among
government security forces, the police are at greater risk than the army. And
Iraqi civilians die in greater numbers than the military and the police.
That reflects the nature of the Iraq conflict, now approaching its fourth
year.
Since the fall of Baghdad and the end of major combat in April 2003, the Iraq
war has been increasingly fought by triggering a bomb on a crowded street, or a
drive-by shooting of a policeman or an ambush of an American patrol.
The increased use by insurgents of roadside bombs often has devastating
effects on civilians. Frequently, the blast misses the intended target 錕斤拷 perhaps
a passing convoy of police, soldiers or foreign security contractors 錕斤拷 and
instead kills mothers carrying groceries home to their families, children
walking to or from school or unemployed men loitering around street corners in
hopes of getting odd jobs.
Civilians are often targets themselves. Sunni religious extremists kill
Shiites, whom they consider heretics and collaborators with the Americans. Death
squads from both the Sunni and Shiite communities hunt down members of the rival
sect in retaliation for offenses committed against their own group.
Such attacks have accelerated following the Dec. 15 parliamentary election,
as extremists in the insurgent ranks seek to derail formation of a new
government of national unity including Sunni Arabs, the backbone of the
insurgency.
U.S. officials fear those attacks might increase because talks among the
Sunni Arab, Shiite and Kurdish communities have broken down. The Iraqis are
already behind schedule on their constitutional timetable for establishing the
new government.
Step one in the process is supposed to be the convening of the 275-member
parliament, which was to have opened within 15 days of the final certification
of the results. The results were certified Feb. 10, but the new parliament has
not convened.
Since the early months of the U.S.-led occupation, civilian casualties have
been a major image problem for the Bush administration. The U.S. military
studiously avoided providing any estimates of civilian deaths.
As the conflict dragged on and the number of car bombs and suicide attacks
increased, U.S. officials shifted strategy, instead highlighting attacks on
civilians and attributing most of them to al-Qaida in Iraq.
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