How many bodies do you need before a conflict becomes a civil war?
6000 civilians killed in May-June, says UN
From: Reuters From correspondents in Baghdad
July 19, 2006
ABOUT 6000 Iraqi civilians were killed in the last two months alone as casualties continued an "upward trend", the United Nations said.
The estimate, compiled with data from Baghdad morgue and the Health Ministry, is the latest attempt to give some statistical expression to the daily bloodshed in Baghdad and elsewhere.
It was part of a bi-monthly UN report on human rights in Iraq.
In a country with barely functioning public institutions, where relatives routinely remove the bodies of victims for burial with little legal formality, any estimates of mortality from the violence are highly approximate.
But a surge in sectarian killing in the past few months has been seen in rising trends in those statistics that exist.
Baghdad morgue officials have said they took in 1595 bodies in June, 1375 in May and 1155 in April. Of those, about 80 per cent were victims of violent deaths, they said.
In December, in the first and only official US estimate of the cost of the war in Iraqi lives, US President George W. Bush said some 30,000 Iraqis had been killed since the 2003 invasion.
A website that compiles media reports of casualties now estimates civilian deaths alone at around 40,000. By no means all deaths have been reported in the media.
The UN noted Iraqi health officials have said a recent media reckoning of 50,000 dead is probably an underestimate.
The UN report included all the morgue entries for May and June in its total of violent deaths along with 1294 deaths recorded in May by the Health Ministry and 1554 in June.
That gave a total cited in the report of 5818 deaths in the two months, the "overwhelming majority" of them in Baghdad.
Health Ministry figures incorporated in a monthly report issued by the Interior Ministry, however, show a lower level of civilian deaths. According to that report, 935 civilians were killed in violence in May and 889 in June.
The UN report cited a Health Ministry figure of 6826 civilians killed in the first six months of 2006 and a morgue total of 14,338 bodies taken in in Baghdad in the same period.
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