The Daily Background
| Leaked data shows increase– not decrease– in ’surge’ violence
by Arlen Parsa
As I wrote about yesterday, British officials are saying that US military commanders plan to judge the effectiveness of the “troop surge” in Iraq merely by a decrease or increase in civillian deaths, and no other factors (such as wounded casualties, types of violence, locations of violence, number of American casualties, etc). Here’s an excerpt from an article I quoted from yesterday:
The “troop surge†by American soldiers in Iraq is not working, one of Britain’s senior military officials in Baghdad has said.
In a pessimistic assessment of the strategy designed to pull Iraq back from all-out civil war, Alastair Campbell, the outgoing defence attaché at the British Embassy in Baghdad, claimed that extra US forces were not achieving the desired drop in violence.
Now the Washington Post is reporting on leaked Iraqi data that backs up that claim that violene is not decreasing:
More than three months into a U.S.-Iraqi security offensive designed to curtail sectarian violence in Baghdad and other parts of Iraq, Health Ministry statistics show that such killings are rising again.
From the beginning of May until Tuesday, 321 unidentified corpses, many dumped and showing signs of torture and execution, have been found across the Iraqi capital, 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. The data showed that the same number of bodies were found in all of January, the month before the launch of the Baghdad security plan.
Some hard numbers buried deeper in the article:
In the 14 weeks preceding the start of the plan on Feb. 14, at least 821 people died in 11 attacks — typically suicide car bombings — that killed more than 20 people at a time, according to a Washington Post analysis. There have been at least 20 such attacks in the 14 weeks since the start of the plan, causing a death toll of at least 1,098, the analysis showed.
[…]
Aggregate figures for Baghdad and eight other provinces also show recent increases: In January, 360 bodies were found; in February, 400; in March, 451; in April, 421; and from May 1 to 22, 443.
My math skills are not the greatest, but it doesn’t take a genius to see that that’s an overall increase in violence.
