Iraqi Civilian Casualties Declined in June, Officials Say
BAGHDAD, July 1 — American and Iraqi officials said Sunday that they saw a decline in the monthly civilian casualty count in June, a development that occurred as the American troop increase reached full strength.
However, the size of the decline was hard to gauge because death counts in Iraq are highly inaccurate. Some bombing victims’ bodies are never recovered, families often collect their dead before they can be counted by officials, and the dead bodies found around Baghdad, while generally taken to the city morgue, are sometimes taken to hospitals where they may not be counted.
An American military spokesman, Lt. Col. Christopher Garver, said there had been only “a slight decrease in the month of June.” He added that it was “a potential downward trend” and that the military would be closely watching the numbers in the coming weeks. The Americans do not make specific figures public.
He added that American and Iraqi troops were just two weeks into a major operation against Sunni insurgents in the belts around Baghdad. “We can’t tell yet the effect we’re having,” he said. “But reducing deaths in the civilian population is why we’re doing what we’re doing.”
Iraqi officials estimated that civilian deaths nationwide had dropped 36 percent in June, down to about 1,200. Civilian casualties in May had topped 1,900, they said. The Web site icasualties.org, which tabulates news reports of civilian deaths, put the number of deaths in June at about 1,342, down from 1,980 in May.
In Baghdad, 730 civilians were reported killed in June from assassinations, bombs or small-arms fire. That was down from 1,070 in May, a decline of almost 32 percent, an Interior Ministry official told The New York Times.
However, the number of dead bodies found in Baghdad, a measure of sectarian killings, while lower in June than in May, still was higher than in April, according to the Interior Ministry official. In April, there were 411 dead bodies found in Baghdad; in May, there were 726; in June, the number dropped to 540.
Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s government no longer reports civilian mortality statistics and has refused to provide figures to the United Nations. Some officials, however, sometimes make reports available to the news media on a not-for-attribution basis.
The influx of American soldiers in the capital has been accompanied by increased raids on insurgent groups and, recently, by a broader offensive in the belts around Baghdad in order to curb the car- and roadside-bomb factories widely believed to supply many of the weapons used by insurgents in the capital.
American soldiers have discovered a number of bomb-making facilities, some quite sophisticated, underscoring the difficulties the military faces in trying to rid the country of lethal explosive devices.
On June 23, American troops in Mosul found one of the largest bomb factories uncovered to date: an elaborate complex spread over three buildings — one used to manufacture car bombs, one to make roadside bombs and one to manufacture homemade explosives. The raid found several vehicles, including a truck, being prepared for use as car bombs. A number of other factories have been found closer to Baghdad.
With the increase in American troops, there has also been a rise in soldiers’ deaths, although somewhat fewer American troops died in June than in April, when there were 112 troop deaths, or May, when deaths reached 126.
However, even as civilian deaths apparently dropped in Baghdad, violence in the surrounding areas, particularly Diyala Province, remained high, and there were reports of violence in Kirkuk and Salahuddin, which has been one of the quieter areas in Iraq for some time.
In Diyala, a powerful roadside bomb exploded Sunday in Baladroz, east of Baquba, the capital, wounding 20 people. Elsewhere in the province, two civilians were kidnapped and killed in an area north of Baquba, and a truck driver was hijacked near Khalis, where two dead bodies were also found.
On Sunday, a truck bomb in Ramadi killed five people and wounded seven. It struck an Iraqi police checkpoint attended by members of the Abu Esha tribe, which has been working with American troops to halt attacks by extremists linked to Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia.
Two car bombs struck Sunni Arab neighborhoods of Baghdad, killing three in Dora and one in Saydia. Also, the police found 14 dead bodies in the capital.
On the political front, Parliament appeared unlikely to make progress in the next few days because the main Sunni Arab coalition, known as Tawafiq, has been boycotting sessions as a protest against the government’s handing of a murder accusation against the culture minister, who is a Sunni Arab. There is also tension among lawmakers over how to handle a demand by many in Parliament that the speaker, Mahmoud Mashhadani, step down.
In what appeared to be an effort to reach out to Sunni Arabs, Mr. Maliki said he wanted to hold provincial elections by the end of the year. Because Sunni Arabs for the most part did not vote in the last round of elections, they sometimes do not control even those provinces in which they represent the majority of the population. The hope is that elections would make government at the provincial level better reflect the sectarian distribution in those areas.
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