Crossposted from SmokeyMonkey.org
The news reports come every day: another group of beheaded bodies shows up on the streets, another suicide bomber kills several in a marketplace, gunmen open fire on worshippers leaving a mosque. They are so numerous as to be seemingly uncountable. And with a government that is confused and incoherent at times, statistics on such killings are hard to come by.
In place of official statistics, it is the Baghdad morgue that has provided the best idea of the degree of violence in Iraq's capital. And according to a report in the NY Times, the morgue shows a large increase in violence.
[NY Times] The morgue, which takes bodies from Baghdad and its outskirts, offers a rough measure of the violence. The toll for last month, provided by the morgue deputy, who insisted on anonymity because he is not authorized to talk to the news media, was roughly double the 879 bodies the morgue received in June 2005.
This graph shows the number of civilian deaths in Baghdad as reported by the morgue for 2005 and 2006 for January through June. You can see quite clearly that deaths this year have doubled over last year and that the last few months have shown a marked increase.
The central morgue said Tuesday that it received 1,595 bodies last month, 16 percent more than in May, in a tally that showed the pace of killing here has increased since the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Al Qaeda's leader in Iraq. [emphasis mine]
For a comparison, there were 15,517 murders in the US in 2000. That breaks down to about 1300 murders per month in the whole United States! Remember that Iraq is a tenth of the population of the US, and that Baghdad (which had nearly 1600 deaths in one month!) is just a few million. Per capita...? I'm not even going there.
Baghdad, home to one-fourth of Iraq's population, has slowly descended into a low-grade civil war in some neighborhoods, with Sunni and Shiite militias carrying out systematic sectarian killings that clear whole city blocks.
I'm not sure why "low-grade" is called for in the above quote, but at least they are calling it what it is, a civil war. Bring our troops home!