The Pentagon’s fondness for secrecy along with partisan agendas in Baghdad often lead to contortions with death tolls and other details.
By Patrick J. McDonnell, Times Staff Writer
September 10, 2006
BAGHDAD — In this besieged capital, it was a rare good-news story: Killings had plummeted by as much as 50% since U.S. and Iraqi forces hit the streets last month in a show of strength after the sectarian bloodbath of July.
“We’re actually seeing progress out there,” Army Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, the chief military spokesman here, said when making the announcement.
Not so fast.
Last week, Iraqi officials released new figures showing the city morgue had received more than 1,500 victims of violent death in August — a significant drop of about 17% from the record of more than 1,800 killings in July, but hardly a great leap forward.
How the U.S. military arrived at the 50% figure remains a mystery. Commanders won’t release the raw data, saying such specifics could help the enemy.[More]
Mystery solved.
U.S. excluded car, suicide bombs from Iraq murder toll
POSTED: 7:25 p.m. EDT, September 11, 2006
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) — The U.S. military did not count people killed by bombs, mortars, rockets or other mass attacks when it reported a dramatic drop in the number of murders in the Baghdad area last month, the U.S. command said Monday.
The decision to include only victims of drive-by shootings and those killed by torture and execution, usually at the hands of death squads, allowed U.S. officials to argue that a security crackdown that began in the capital August 7 had more than halved the city’s murder rate.
But the types of slayings, including suicide bombings, that the U.S. excluded from the category of “murder” were not made explicit at the time. That led to confusion after Iraqi Health Ministry figures showed that 1,536 people died violently in and around Baghdad in August, nearly the same number as in July.
The figures raise serious questions about the success of the security operation launched by the U.S.-led coalition. When they released the murder rate figures, U.S. officials and their Iraqi counterparts were eager to show progress in restoring security in Baghdad at a time when Iraq appeared on the verge of civil war. [More]