[NYTr] Iraq's Civilian Death Toll 23,00 in 2007

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

excerpted from Informed Comment - Jan 2, 2008
http://www.juancole.com/2008/01/36-dead-in-baghdad-bombing-23000.html


36 Dead in Baghdad Bombing; 23,000 Civilians Killed in 07

by Juan Cole

After having celebrated New Year's Eve in style for the first time
since 2002, Baghdad awoke on the first of the year to bad news. In a
signature tactic of the Salafi Jihadis in Iraq, a suicide bomber
detonated his payload at a Shiite commemoration for the departed in
Zayouna, a mixed neighborhood of east Baghdad, killing 36 and wounding
dozens. The first chapter of the Qur'an was being recited for Nabil
Hussein Jasim, a retired Lt. Colonel, who had himself been killed in a
suicide bombing at Tayaran Square on Dec. 28, which had killed 14
persons. Killing people and then bombing their funerals or
commemoration ceremonies has been a frequently used method of terror
for Sunni Arab guerrillas. After all, what a terrorist wants is a crowd
that is distracted where a stranger would not stand out. Funerals fit
the bill, and it is easy to arrange for there to be a funeral, they
just whack someone. Killing a retired officer has the bonus for the
terrorist that other officers and police officials will probably attend
his funeral, where they can be bombed. (That happened here.) The
bombing underlined the truth of the warnings recently issued by Gen.
David Petraeus that the path to social peace in Iraq would be long,
hard and uneven. You kind of wish that the more rightwing sections of
the American press had his realism.

The Iraq Body Count reports:
http://www.iraqbodycount.org/analysis/numbers/2007/

    ' Another 22,586–24,159 civilian deaths have been recorded in 2007
through Iraq Body Count’s extensive monitoring of media and official
reports. . . These figures . . . show beyond any doubt that civil
security in Iraq remains in a parlous state. Figures for the most
recent months indicate that violence in Iraq has returned to the
monthly levels IBC was recording in 2005, a year which was itself
(until 2006) the worst since the invasion . . .