From The Chicago Tribune, 8/11/05:
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/chitribts/20050811/ts_chicagotrib/bombsbadenoughbutgunsworseinbaghdad
Bombs bad enough, but guns worse in Baghdad
By Liz Sly Tribune foreign correspondent
July was a record month at Baghdad's main morgue, where the bodies
pile up so fast they often have to be buried before they can be
identified to make way for the next day's arrivals.
A total of 1,100 corpses were received in July, a sharp increase from
the previous record of 879 in June, and far exceeding the morgue's
10-a-day capacity, according to its overworked director, Faed Bakr.
The figures exclude casualties from bombings, which are not taken for
autopsy because the cause of death already is known.
While car bombings and suicide attacks have garnered the most
attention and have claimed thousands of lives in Iraq, shootings have
accounted for thousands more civilian deaths since the fall of
Saddam Hussein's regime.
At the morgue last month, more than 60 percent of the deaths--676, or
more than 20 a day--came from shootings, in yet another indicator that
overall violence in the world's most violent capital keeps getting
worse, even as the U.S. military and the Iraqi government insist that
the insurgency is being tamed.
"When you have this number of killings every day, when you have 676
people die from shooting in a month, you're talking about mass
killing," Bakr said.
"It's not civil war, but it's instability, and it's out of control."
It is impossible to attribute all the killings to the insurgency.
The statistics include common murders as well as civilians killed by
Iraqi security forces and American troops.
Many mutilated before death
But the rise in shootings coincides with surging reports of
assassinations, drive-by shootings and unexplained killings.
Many victims handled by the morgue were mutilated before they were
killed, and almost all of them have been men, Bakr said.
The figures point to the only clearly discernible trend to the
violence in Iraq's capital:
It keeps getting worse.
The patterns shift, the methods evolve, the tactics adjust and the
nature of the killings changes month to month, but there has been no
letup in the dying.
June was a peak month for beheadings, May was a record month for
suicide bombings, and now assassinations and drive-by shootings are
the trend.
In recent weeks, politicians, government employees and religious
leaders have been among the victims in what appears to be a
coordinated campaign of assassinations.
Ten police officers were killed Tuesday in drive-by shootings.
A Baghdad police captain was slain by gunmen Wednesday.
Deputy Prime Minister Ahmad Chalabi has lost two of his aides and a
bodyguard to shooting attacks in the past two weeks.
In July, three Sunnis involved in drafting the nation's new
constitution were slain in a drive-by shooting and two aides to the
top Shiite religious leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, were
gunned down.
Measuring the impact of the violence on Iraqis always has been
difficult.
The U.S. military says it doesn't keep a tally of Iraqi casualties,
and the Iraqi government generally refuses to release casualty totals,
making it difficult to discern trends or even to estimate the total
number of Iraqis being killed.
Two attempts to quantify the violence, by the UN's Development Program
and by Iraq Body Count, a Web site, each came up with the figure of
about 24,000 violent deaths in the two years after the invasion, or an
average of 1,000 a month.
The Brookings Institution's Iraq Index puts the number of victims of
car bombings at 3,310 since May 2003.
In June, the Interior Ministry said 12,000 Iraqis had been killed
nationwide by insurgents in the previous 18 months, but that figure
excluded insurgents killed in military operations and civilians killed
by American troops or Iraqi security forces.
The morgue's figures apply only to Baghdad, and there is no reason to
believe that other cities are witnessing a parallel rise in violence.
But the number of bodies received at Baghdad's morgue has risen
steadily this year, from a low of 596 in March to July's 1,100. Last
year the morgue received 8,035 bodies -- more than 60 percent of them
gunshot victims -- but 2005 is on track to exceed that number.
Body count in Hussein's era
"In the days of Saddam, we had maybe 16 shootings a month," Bakr said.
"Now we have more than that every day."
Just as disturbing, Bakr said, are the growing number of reports of
mass killings, some of which appear to be motivated by sectarian
hatred.
The bound bodies of 20 abducted Shiites were found in western Baghdad
last week, and a Shiite family of eight was slaughtered in their home
last month, in two examples of killings that appeared to stem from the
deepening hostility between Shiite and Sunni Muslims that has
accompanied the transfer of power to a Shiite-majority government.
Sunnis also are being slain, and several leading Sunnis have accused
the new government's security forces of responsibility for some of the
killings.
Other deaths slip below the radar screen of the news reports, such as
the Shiite street seller felled by a hail of bullets outside his home
after defying a warning posted in a local market telling Shiites not
to sell there.
His killing was recounted last week by family members who asked to
remain anonymous because they fear being targeted by the same gunmen.
"Nobody knows who's killing whom. Even the police don't know," Bakr
said.
"Everybody is vulnerable, and no part of the community is immune."
The increase in shootings coincided with a dip in the number of car
bombings, according to the U.S. military, which took the unusual step
this week of releasing statistics for the past three months to
demonstrate that the effort to interdict the insurgent activities is
working.
From a peak of 132 car bombings in May, 59 of which were suicide
attacks, the number fell to 83 in July, 39 of them suicide bombings,
the military said.
In June there were 108 car bombings, 58 of them suicide attacks.
But U.S. officials warn the decline may represent only a lull as the
insurgency gears up for the Aug. 15 deadline for the completion of the
constitution and the Oct. 15 nationwide referendum on the charter.
Already, August is turning into one of the bloodiest months yet for
U.S. forces in Iraq, with 38 deaths reported so far.
The deadliest month for U.S. troops was November 2004, with 137
deaths.
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Shhhhhhh. Don't bother Li'l Georgie, he's on a 5 week vacation.
Harry
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