Violent Deaths in Iraq Dropped in August

Iraqi army soldiers view the wreckage of a car used as a car bomb targeting a police patrol, in Baghdad, Iraq, Thursday Aug. 31, 2006, wounding two policemen. Iraqi forces will take over security control of a southern province from coalition troops next month, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said Thursday.(AP Photo/Hadi Mizban) (Hadi Mizban - AP)

Ministry officials stressed the August figures were preliminary and a final count for the month would not be ready until next week. Nevertheless, officials said they were convinced deaths were down sharply.

"In June and July we were getting scary numbers," said Hakim al-Zamly, a Health Ministry executive director.

He said it was too early to determine whether the drop was a breakthrough but "there's definitely a slight, relative improvement."

Both U.S. and Iraqi officials have been anxious to talk up signs of improvement in the capital after weeks of ever-mounting death tolls and fears of all-out sectarian civil war. On Aug. 21, the Defense Ministry said "terrorist operations" had declined in Baghdad by 70 percent.

Some U.S. officials, however, have cautioned it is too early to tell if the decline in deaths is part of a long-term trend.

A surge of violence has killed more than 250 people in the Baghdad area since Sunday, raising questions about whether U.S. and Iraqi forces have indeed turned the corner.

However, National Security Adviser Mouwafak al-Rubaie insisted Thursday that execution-style killings and sectarian violence have dropped by 45 percent in Baghdad in the last six weeks. He said that was mainly due to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's national reconciliation plan and the Baghdad security operation.

"There's definitely a much better sense of security among the general public," al-Rubaie said.

Accurate figures on the number of people who have died in the Iraq conflict have long been the subject of debate. Police and hospitals often give widely conflicting figures of those killed in major bombings.

In addition, death figures are reported through multiple channels by government agencies that function with varying efficiency.

The Health Ministry count is based on reports from hospital morgues throughout the country and mostly includes civilians. The Interior Ministry receives its figures from police stations across the country and can include both police and civilians. The Defense Ministry reports the number of soldiers and insurgents killed.

Although officials at the national level attempt to reconcile the figures, there is a possibility of double-counting.

Furthermore, accurate data is difficult to obtain from insurgent-infested areas such as Anbar province, which includes about 20 percent of Iraq's land area and where government institutions barely function.

Militias and other armed groups are often reluctant to bring their dead and wounded to hospitals for fear of arrest, and those deaths may never show up in any government agency counts.

It is also unclear how many people may have been abducted by insurgents or sectarian death squads, then slain and their bodies never found.

According to an AP count, at least 11,916 Iraqis have been killed in war-related violence since the first elected Iraqi government after the fall of Saddam Hussein took office on April 28, 2005.

Iraq Body Count, a private group that bases its figures in part on reports by 40 media outlets, puts the number of civilian deaths since the conflict began at between 41,041 and 45,613.

The Brookings Institution Iraq Index, maintained by Michael O'Hanlon, put the count between 20,000 and 37,200 as of July 5, 2006.

President Bush, in answering questions following a speech in December, estimated "30,000, more or less, have died as a result of the initial incursion and the ongoing violence against Iraqis."