Iraq

Deaths in Iraq rise sharply in April

BAGHDAD - Volunteers hunting for bodies in Fallujah find a woman and her daughter in their home, killed in the siege but undiscovered for days. Chanting mourners bury two boys caught in the cross fire of a Baghdad gunfight. A morgue in Basra overflows with torn and burned bodies from a suicide bombing.

Victims - young and old, women and men, insurgents and innocents - have been piling up day by day, making April the deadliest month for Iraqis - and Americans - since the fall of Saddam Hussein a year ago.

Official and complete death counts for Iraqis nationwide are unavailable. But a count by the Associated Press found that approximately 1,360 Iraqis were killed from April 1 to April 30 - 10 times the 136 or more U.S. troops who died during the same period.

The Iraqi tally was compiled from daily records of violence reported by AP, based on statements issued by the U.S. military, Iraqi police and local hospitals. The count includes civilians, insurgents and members of the Iraqi security forces, though a detailed breakdown was not possible. The Iraqi health ministry and the Red Crescent could not be reached Friday.

Also, the tally is likely incomplete, because witnesses reported deaths in some attacks that could not be confirmed by a hospital, the Iraqi police or U.S. officials.

The daily carnage, seen by Iraqis before their own eyes and in bloody images and photos transmitted around the country by Arab television and Iraqi newspapers, has heightened anti-U.S. sentiment across the country - even when the deaths were caused by insurgent attacks.

The siege of Fallujah, where Americans unleashed their arsenal of warplanes and tanks, became a symbol of resistance that rallied many Iraqis - Shiite and Sunni - to the antioccupation cause.

And the sheer variety of violence - car suicide bombs, roadside bombs, insurgent rocket and mortar attacks on civilian neighborhoods, gunbattles - has deepened Iraqis' sense of instability and left them skeptical of U.S. promises of peace and prosperity.

"For this to be happening a year after Saddam fell, Iraqis are shocked," said Mahmoud Othman, a member of the U.S.-picked Governing Council.

"This shows that the United States cannot rule Iraq properly. They thought they could do a better job than if they created an Iraqi government right from the start."

The majority of Iraqi deaths likely took place in the Marine siege of Fallujah, but the toll there has been a source of controversy. The head of Fallujah's hospital, Rafie al-Issawi, said Friday his records show 731 killed and around 2,800 wounded since the Marine siege began on April 1. His number is factored into the AP count.

The Iraqi health minister, Khudayer Abbas, gave a much lower number on April 22, saying 271 people were killed in the city. He also put the total number of Iraqi dead for the month so far, including Fallujah, at 576 - far lower than the AP count.

U.S. officials have said they do not have a count of Iraqi civilians killed this month. On April 20, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the top commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, said troops had killed 1,000 insurgents in April. That number was not factored into the AP count because it was not known what specific battles he was referring to.

By comparison, the next deadliest month for Iraqis since the start of the U.S. occupation was March, when 301 Iraqi civilians were killed, according to the Brookings Institution, which keeps a rough but widely respected monthly tally.

The Brookings number does not include insurgent or Iraqi police deaths, as the AP's April tally does. But at the most, a few dozen armed Iraqis died in March, not nearly enough to reach the number of April's dead.

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