http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HJ05Ak02.html<snip>How many freelance militias are there in Baghdad?
The answer is "23" according to a "senior {US} military official" in Baghdad - so write Richard A Oppel Jr and Hosham Hussein in the New York Times; but according to US National Public Radio, the answer is "at least 23". Antonio Castaneda of the Associated Press says there are 23 "known" militias. However you figure it, that's a staggering number of militias, mainly Shi'ite, but some Sunni, for one large city.
How many civilians are dying in the Iraqi capital, because of those militias, numerous (often government-linked) death squads, the Sunni insurgency, and al-Qaeda in Iraq-style terrorism?
More than 5,100 people in July and August, according to a recently released United Nations report. The previous, still staggering but significantly lower figure of 3,391 offered for those months relied on body counts only from the city morgue. The UN report also includes deaths at the city's overtaxed hospitals. With the Bush administration bringing thousands of extra US and Iraqi soldiers into the capital in August, death tolls went down somewhat for a few weeks, but began rising again toward month's end. August figures on civilian wounded - 4,309 - rose 14% over July's figures and, by late September, suicide bombings were at their highest level since the invasion.
How many Iraqis are being tortured in Baghdad at present?
Precise numbers are obviously in short supply on this one, but large numbers of bodies are found in and around the capital every single day, a result of the roiling civil war already under way there. These bodies, as Oppel of the Times describes them, commonly display a variety of signs of torture, including "gouged-out eyeballs, wounds in the head and genitals, broken bones of legs and hands, electric and cigarette burns ... acid-induced injuries and burns caused by chemical substances, missing skin ... missing teeth and wounds caused by power drills or nails". The UN's chief anti-torture expert, Manfred Nowak, believes that torture in Iraq is now not only "totally out of hand" but "worse" than under dictator Saddam Hussein.
How many Iraqi civilians are being killed countrywide?
The UN Report offers figures on this: 1,493 dead, over and above the dead of Baghdad. However, these figures are surely undercounts. Oppel points out, for instance, that officials in al-Anbar province, the heartland of the Sunni insurgency "and one of the deadliest regions in Iraq, reported no deaths in July".
Meanwhile, in Diyala province, northeast of Baghdad, deaths not only seem to be on the rise, but higher than previously estimated. The intrepid British journalist Patrick Cockburn recently visited the province. It's not a place, he comments parenthetically, "to make a mistake in map-reading".
(Enter the wrong area or neighborhood and you're dead.) Diyala, he reports, is now largely under the control of Sunni insurgents who are "close to establishing a 'Taliban republic' in the region". On casualties, he writes: "Going by the accounts of police and government officials in the province, the death toll outside Baghdad may be far higher than previously reported." The head of Diyala's provincial council (who has so far escaped two assassination attempts) told Cockburn that he believed "on average, 100 people are being killed in Diyala every week". ("Many of those who die disappear forever, thrown into the Diyala River or buried in date-palm groves and fruit orchards.")
We're talking about close to 40,000 Iraqi deaths a year. We have no way of knowing how much higher the real figure is.