IRAQ: Almost 1,400 Iraqi civilians were murdered in targeted killings last month in Baghdad alone, and many more died in indiscriminate bomb blasts, making May the bloodiest month in the capital since the war began, Iraq's health ministry said yesterday.
The grim statistics came as Iraqi police found nine severed heads in plastic bags stuffed in cardboard fruit boxes by the side of a road in the al-Hadid area of Baquba, north of Baghdad, and a report said US troops mistakenly killed as many as seven Iraqi civilians a week at checkpoints last summer. This death rate has since been brought down to one a week, after top officers ordered changes to how checkpoints were manned.
The checkpoint casualty statistics, published by the Wall Street Journal, quoting US defence officials in Iraq, reflect a heavy toll on civilians who fail to notice or understand orders to stop their cars and are shot by troops nervous about suicide bombers. They do not include deliberate killings by US troops, such as the Haditha massacre last November. They also exclude those killed by insurgents.
Sarah Sewall, director of the Carr Centre for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University, which has been working with the military to refine counter-insurgency techniques, said the decrease in checkpoint deaths was part of a broader effort to reduce civilian casualties.
A manual on how to operate checkpoints, produced by the Centre for Army Lessons Learned, at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, is to be distributed to troops soon. The reforms have been driven by Lieut Gen David Petraeus, the commanding general at Fort Leavenworth, and Lieut Gen Peter Chiarelli, the coalition commander in Iraq.
Lieut Gen Chiarelli ordered that, alongside the often perfunctory legal investigations into the accidental shooting of civilians, lessons should be drawn from each incident and operating procedures adjusted accordingly.
"It's a different ethos towards civilian casualties," Ms Sewall said. "It's wonderfully important. The tragedy is that it's happening in this particular war."
Meanwhile yesterday, Iraq's new prime minister Nuri al-Maliki said he would release 2,500 prisoners in an apparent bid to shore up his own authority amid signs of tension in his ruling Shia Alliance. The prime minister said the prisoner release would free those who had no clear evidence against them or had been mistakenly detained. Initially, 500 people will be released today, he said, but did not give details. Many of those in prison are from ousted president Saddam Hussein's once dominant Sunni community.
"Those who will be released will be people who are not Saddam Hussein loyalists or terrorists or anyone who has Iraqi blood on their hands," said Mr al-Maliki, who took office on May 2nd. He cited the release of those imprisoned without just cause as one of his priorities when his cabinet took office. Such detentions, by Iraqi and US security forces, have been a major source of popular discontent.
Yesterday's announcement came amid comments from anonymous political sources that rivals in the Shia Alliance have blocked efforts to name interior and defence ministers and believe the government may not endure. Both portfolios have been vacant since the government was sworn in and some Shia Alliance members outside Mr al-Maliki's Dawa party believe it cannot last more than six months.
The urgency in appointing ministers who can start tackling relentless violence was underscored by the discovery of nine severed heads in a volatile area north of Baghdad, the second such find in the last few days in Diyala province. Police in Baquba said nine heads were found in cardboard crates in the city's northern al-Hadid district, three days after the cut-off heads of seven cousins and a Sunni Arab Imam were found by the side of the road near Baquba. In Baghdad, bombing, mortar and shooting attacks killed at least 15 people.