Belying upbeat remarks, Baghdad's body count soars

By Ellen Knickmeyer, Washington Post | September 8, 2006

BAGHDAD -- Baghdad's morgue almost tripled its count yesterday for violent deaths last month in Iraq's capital, to 1,536, authorities said yesterday. The corrected figure, replacing a tally of 550, appeared to erase most of what US generals and Iraqi leaders had touted as evidence of progress in a major security operation to restore order in the capital.

Separately, the Health Ministry confirmed yesterday that it planned to construct two new branch morgues in Baghdad and add doctors and refrigerator units to raise capacity to 250 corpses a day.

The morgue expansion plans and the final body count for August show the dramatic surge in violence in Baghdad since US-led foreign troops entered Iraq in 2003. Baghdad's morgue chiefly handles unidentified gunshot victims, now predominantly shot execution-style and often found with hands bound and showing signs of torture.

Since the spring, as sectarian violence has mounted, monthly counts of civilian casualties have reached the highest levels of the war, topping 1,800 at the Baghdad morgue in July. At least 3,438 Iraqis were killed across the country that month, according to Iraqi government figures, nearing the total of roughly 5,000 for the entire first year of the war.

In 2002, before US-led forces entered Iraq, the Baghdad morgue averaged 15 shooting victims a month, morgue officials have said.
Gianni Magazzeni, chief of the UN human rights office in Iraq, which tracks casualty figures from Iraq's government, confirmed yesterday that the government-run Baghdad morgue had reported 1,536 dead for August.
Bombing victims and many others who die violently in Baghdad are taken to the city's hospitals rather than the morgue. The figures announced yesterday do not include those killings, nor killings outside of Baghdad and its surrounding towns. A complete countrywide toll is due from the Health Ministry later this month.

At the end of August, Baghdad's morgue initially reported receiving only 550 bodies during the month. US military and Iraqi government officials hailed what they said was a massive decrease in violence, calling it a sign of the success of Operation Forward Together. The joint US-Iraqi security push had placed at least four of Baghdad's most violent neighborhoods under cordons and search operations, which were welcomed by many residents for the relief from violence that they brought.

Major General William Caldwell by late August was claiming a 46 percent decrease in the murder rate in Baghdad for that month. ``We are actually seeing progress," Caldwell said at the time.