Deaths from sectarian strife in Baghdad are reaching unprecedented levels, with the central morgue on Wednesday reporting a sharp rise in the number of corpses it received during July.
Officials said 1 815 bodies — about 60 a day — had passed through its doors last month, compared with 1 595 in June. Of those, 90% were reported to have suffered violent deaths.
”Most of the cases have gunshot wounds to the head,” Abdul Razzaq al-Obaidi, the morgue’s assistant manager, told Reuters. ”Some of them were strangled and others were beaten to death with clubs.”
The figure is the highest monthly toll since February, when an attack on the Shi’ite shrine in Samarra by suspected al-Qaeda militants unleashed a wave of tit-for-tat killings between Baghdad’s Shi’ite and Sunni communities.
However, a tally from the Iraqi government — which consistently offers low estimates for the number of deaths — put July’s toll at 1 000.
”Whatever the true figures, Iraqis are continuing to die in shocking numbers,” said a senior government official, underlining the scale of the task faced by the Shi’ite-led administration in trying to implement its plan for national reconciliation and avert a broader civil war.
About 6 000 extra Iraqi forces and 3 500 United States soldiers redeployed from the north have embarked on a crackdown in the Baghdad area aimed at halting the activities of insurgents, death squads, militias and criminal gangs.
”We must dramatically reduce the level of violence in Baghdad that is fuelling sectarianism,” Major General JD Thurman, the commander of the coalition forces in Baghdad, said on Wednesday.
The new security initiative has already run into political trouble following strong criticism by the Prime Minister, Nuri al-Maliki, of an American-led raid in the Shi’ite stronghold of Sadr City on Monday.
The violence shows no sign of abating. Insurgent attacks across the country are averaging about 90 a day; kidnappings 30 to 40 a day. Last month saw the detonation of 75 car bombs. The violence of the past six months has also caused large-scale population displacement. According to Iraq’s ministry of displacement and migration, about 1 250 families are being uprooted every week. That number excludes the self-ruling Kurdish region, which has received thousands of families in the past six months.
In a more auspicious development, US troops said they arrested four Iraqis in connection with the abduction earlier this year of American journalist Jill Carroll. — Guardian Unlimited Â