One-Day Toll in Iraq Combat Is Highest for U.S. in Months

Most bodies are found dumped on Baghdad's streets each morning after a night of curfew, when only government security forces are supposed to be out.

Bodies are increasingly being dumped in and around Baghdad in fields staked out by individual Shiite militias and Sunni insurgent groups. Iraqi security forces often refuse to go to the dumping grounds, leaving the precise number of bodies in those sites unknown.

Civilian deaths, unlike those of American troops, often go unrecorded. No count exists of all the civilians killed in the spiraling violence since U.S.-led forces entered Iraq. President Bush earlier this year put the number at 30,000 but gave no sources. Indices drawing only on the deaths reported by news organizations put the figure closer to 50,000.

A study published last week in the Lancet medical journal in Britain estimated the true toll was 655,000. Researchers derived their figure from surveys of Iraqis, who were asked to show death certificates to verify deaths in their families caused by the war. The methodology of that survey has been challenged.

U.S. Defense Department statistics show average daily Iraqi troop casualties jumped to 120 in the three months ending September, up from 80 in the previous quarter.

In September, 2,667 Iraqis were killed in Baghdad alone; the government has yet to release last month's figures for all of Iraq.

U.S. officials sought Wednesday to bolster support for the war.

"It will be long, and it will be hard. I wish it were otherwise," Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said in a speech at Maxwell-Gunter Air Force Base in Montgomery, Ala. "Certainly, seeing the violence on television is a temptation for people to wonder: How will it end?"

"There are those who say, Well, it is somebody else's problem," he said. But he voiced confidence that "the wave of violence" in Iraq will ultimately be defeated, saying Iraqi security forces are growing more capable.

Rumsfeld described a recent meeting at Bethesda Navy hospital with a wounded Marine who had served in Iraq as an embedded trainer with the Iraqi military. "If the American people will just give us time," he quoted the Marine as saying.

Asked whether the 10 deaths Tuesday would make Bush reconsider his plans for Iraq, White House spokesman Tony Snow said, "No, his plan is to win."

"The president understands not only the difficulty of it, but he grieves for the people who have served with valor," Snow said in Washington. "But as everybody says correctly, we've got to win. And that comes at a cost."

Some U.S. military leaders in Iraq have said they are puzzled by the rise in violence since midsummer. Military spokesmen attribute the most recent climb to a typical increase in attacks during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan and say they expect the toll to drop when Ramadan ends in coming days.

"It's a dangerous place, and we're trying to mitigate the risk," Lt. Col. Christopher C. Garver, a U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad, said Wednesday.

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who heads a government led by Shiite religious parties, traveled to Najaf on Wednesday to seek consensus with two of the country's most influential Shiite leaders about quelling the skyrocketing sectarian violence.

"I came so that the security and political situation can be stabilized, allowing the government to turn its attention to reconstruction," Maliki told reporters between meetings with Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani and cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, who commands one of the country's most powerful political blocs and militias.

At Maliki's request, the U.S. military freed a Sadr official in Baghdad whom it had held overnight, U.S. and Iraqi officials said. Ali al-Dabbagh, a spokesman for Maliki, said the official was innocent. Aides said the official was a Sadr office manager in the heavily Shiite Baghdad neighborhood of Shoula.

Maliki has blocked U.S. military moves toward a crackdown on Sadr's militia as a whole. "The issue of militias should be solved politically,'' Dabbagh said in a telephone interview Wednesday.

Staff writers John Ward Anderson in Baghdad, Ann Scott Tyson and Debbi Wilgoren in Washington and special correspondents Saad al-Izzi in Baghdad and Saad Sarhan in Najaf contributed to this report.