What Defines a Killing as Sectarian?

The U.S. intelligence community considers more than numbers in making its war assessments. "What the Iraqis perceive" about their country and their daily lives "may be more important than what the numbers are," said a senior intelligence official, who discussed the subject on the condition of anonymity. Even so, he said, intelligence officials found contradictions in the available statistics as they wrote last month's National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, whose conclusions were somewhat less optimistic than the military's.

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"It's not anybody trying to make it come out one way or another way," said the official, who sympathized with the military's need to quantify. But it is important, he said, to determine "what the numbers meant. Who collected them? Why do numbers that come in from this piece of the U.S. government differ from those coming in from another part of the government?"

While both Petraeus and the recent Pentagon report emphasized improved statistics over the past three months, the intelligence community generally declines to declare trends based on data measured in periods shorter than six months to a year. Several senior intelligence officials said last week that most numerical indicators appear to be moving in a uniformly positive direction in the nearly two months since the intelligence estimate's data cutoff -- although they said it is too early to determine definitive trends.

As questions have been raised about its statistics, the military has tried to make them more transparent. After his congressional testimony, Petraeus released an unclassified version of a Multi-National Force-Iraq document titled "Ethno-Sectarian Violence Methodology," and the Baghdad command last week provided a telephone interview with Macomber, the man directly in charge of implementing it.

Macomber, an 18-year Army veteran, said that he is a "senior all-source intelligence analyst" and that the mission of his six-person team is "to compile [data] and track trends and analysis for General Petraeus." Daily data on civilian killings are compiled in a database called the Combined Information Data Network Exchange. The source of the information "could be a coalition force out on patrol," Macomber said. "It could be police, or somebody who called and said they found a body."

"We look at every single record and de-conflict between coalition and host nation [information] to ensure that nothing is duplicate or erroneous," he said. "Then we look at every record and apply our methodology and criteria to it and assess whether it's ethno-sectarian."

Their written definition of that term is: "An event and any associated civilian deaths caused by or during murders/executions, kidnappings, direct fire, indirect fire, and all types of explosive devices identified as being conducted by one ethnic/religious person/group directed at a different ethnic/religious person/group, where the primary motivation for the event is based on ethnicity or religious sect."

The process to determine whether a body is that of a Shiite, a Sunni or a member of any one of a welter of minority sects in Iraq is imperfect, Macomber said. "Sometimes they know by any type of identification," he said. "There are times when they don't know. . . . A lot of times it comes down to, a body was found in a Shiite area, it wasn't moved anywhere, and we'll make that call that it was likely a Shiite person."

Recent sectarian fighting in an area is another clue. "It's not perfect to be able to identify every single person," Macomber said. "But there are pieces out there that we can use to help us." At the end of the day, he said, "it's an analyst making an analyst's call."

The killing of seven Iraqis on Aug. 25 in the predominately Shiite Baghdad neighborhood of Kadhimiya was judged sectarian. The victims were Shiites, and the method and location -- a car bomb in a marketplace -- pointed to Sunnis.

Two Iraqis killed by a car bomb on Sept. 3 were not included in the sectarian database, however. The attack occurred on a road near Ramadi, not far from where President Bush was meeting with government officials that day. But the victims, regardless of ethnicity or sect, were Iraqi policemen. They were counted elsewhere.