"In the days of Saddam, we had maybe 16 shootings a month," Bakr said. "Now we have more than that every day."
Baghdad morgue receiving 1,100 corpses monthly.
Courtesy of HighBeam™ Research Chicago Tribune (Chicago, Illinois) (via Knight-Ridder/Tribune Business News) 8/11/2005
Byline: Liz Sly Aug. 11--July was a record month at Baghdad's main morgue, where the bodies pile up so fast they often have to be buried before they can be identified to make way for the next day's arrivals.
A total of 1,100 corpses were received in July, a sharp increase from the previous record of 879 in June, and far exceeding the morgue's 10-a-day capacity, according to its overworked director, Faed Bakr.
The figures exclude casualties from bombings, which are not taken for autopsy because the cause of death already is known. While car bombings and suicide attacks have garnered the most attention and have claimed thousands of lives in Iraq, shootings have accounted for thousands more civilian deaths since the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime.
At the morgue last month, more than 60 percent of the deaths--676, or more than 20 a day--came from shootings, in yet another indicator that overall violence in the world's most violent capital keeps getting worse, even as the U.S. military and the Iraqi government insist that the insurgency is being tamed.
"When you have this number of killings every day, when you have 676 people die from shooting in a month, you're talking about mass killing," Bakr said. "It's not civil war, but it's instability, and it's out of control."
It is impossible to attribute all the killings to the insurgency. The statistics include common murders as well as civilians killed by Iraqi security forces and American troops. Many mutilated before death
But the rise in shootings coincides with surging reports of assassinations, drive-by shootings and unexplained killings. Many victims handled by the morgue were mutilated before they were killed, and almost all of them have been men, Bakr said.
The figures point to the only clearly discernible trend to the violence in Iraq's capital: It keeps getting worse. The patterns shift, the methods evolve, the tactics adjust and the nature of the killings changes month to month, but there has been no letup in the dying.
June was a peak month for beheadings, May was a record month for suicide bombings, and now assassinations and drive-by shootings are the trend. In recent weeks, politicians, government employees and religious leaders have been among the victims in what appears to be a coordinated campaign of assassinations.
Ten police officers were killed Tuesday in drive-by shootings. A Baghdad police captain was slain by gunmen Wednesday. Deputy Prime Minister Ahmad Chalabi has lost two of his aides and a bodyguard to shooting attacks in the past two weeks.
In July, three Sunnis involved in drafting the nation's new constitution were slain in a drive-by shooting and two aides to the top Shiite religious leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, were gunned down.
Measuring the impact of the violence on Iraqis always has been difficult. The U.S. military says it doesn't keep a tally of Iraqi casualties, and the Iraqi government generally refuses to release casualty totals, making it difficult to discern trends or even to estimate the total number of Iraqis being killed.
Two attempts to quantify the violence, by the UN's Development Program and by Iraq Body Count, a Web site, each came up with the figure of about 24,000 violent deaths in the two years after the invasion, or an average of 1,000 a month. The Brookings Institution's Iraq Index puts the number of victims of car bombings at 3,310 since May 2003.
In June, the Interior Ministry said 12,000 Iraqis had been killed nationwide by insurgents in the previous 18 months, but that figure excluded insurgents killed in military operations and civilians killed by American troops or Iraqi security forces.
The morgue's figures apply only to Baghdad, and there is no reason to believe that other cities are witnessing a parallel rise in violence. But the number of bodies received at Baghdad's morgue has risen steadily this year, from a low of 596 in March to July's 1,100. Last year the morgue received 8,035 bodies -- more than 60 percent of them gunshot victims -- but 2005 is on track to exceed that number.
Body count in Hussein's era "In the days of Saddam, we had maybe 16 shootings a month," Bakr said. "Now we have more than that every day."
Just as disturbing, Bakr said, are the growing number of reports of mass killings, some of which appear to be motivated by sectarian hatred. The bound bodies of 20 abducted Shiites were found in western Baghdad last week, and a Shiite family of eight was slaughtered in their home last month, in two examples of killings that appeared to stem from the deepening hostility between Shiite and Sunni Muslims that has accompanied the transfer of power to a Shiite-majority government.
Sunnis also are being slain, and several leading Sunnis have accused the new government's security forces of responsibility for some of the killings.
Other deaths slip below the radar screen of the news reports, such as the Shiite street seller felled by a hail of bullets outside his home after defying a warning posted in a local market telling Shiites not to sell there. His killing was recounted last week by family members who asked to remain anonymous because they fear being targeted by the same gunmen.
"Nobody knows who's killing whom. Even the police don't know," Bakr said. "Everybody is vulnerable, and no part of the community is immune."
The increase in shootings coincided with a dip in the number of car bombings, according to the U.S. military, which took the unusual step this week of releasing statistics for the past three months to demonstrate that the effort to interdict the insurgent activities is working.
>From a peak of 132 car bombings in May, 59 of which were suicide attacks, the number fell to 83 in July, 39 of them suicide bombings, the military said. In June there were 108 car bombings, 58 of them suicide attacks.
But U.S. officials warn the decline may represent only a lull as the insurgency gears up for the Aug. 15 deadline for the completion of the constitution and the Oct. 15 nationwide referendum on the charter.
Already, August is turning into one of the bloodiest months yet for U.S. forces in Iraq, with 38 deaths reported so far. The deadliest month for U.S. troops was November 2004, with 137 deaths.
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