Reply #21: US military estimates Iraqi toll from insurgency (Reuters)

[Up2Late]

(Yes, this IS the first Pentagon Estimate, and NO, It's NOT a complete count, it leaves out a LOT of people, mostly the one's that WE killed.)

US military estimates Iraqi toll from insurgency

Sun Oct 30, 2005 04:15 AM ET

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Pentagon has estimated that nearly 26,000 Iraqis have been killed or wounded in attacks by insurgents since January 2004, with the daily number increasing fairly steadily. A Pentagon report to Congress said casualties among Iraqi civilians and security forces rose from about 26 a day between January 1 and March 31, 2004, to about 64 a day between August 29 and September 16, 2005, just before the referendum on the Iraqi constitution.

The Pentagon has not previously provided such a comprehensive estimate of the Iraqi casualty toll from insurgent attacks. It also refuses to release data on the number of Iraqi civilians killed or wounded by U.S. forces. "Approximately 80 percent of all attacks are directed against Coalition Forces, but 80 percent of all casualties are suffered by Iraqis," the report said. It was made available on the Pentagon's Web site.

The report noted that attacks by insurgents increased as expected in the runup to the referendum. Weekly attacks numbered just under 200 in the first quarter of 2004, and rose to over 650 a week as the referendum approached. The daily figures were presented in a bar graph covering six time periods since January 2004.

A Pentagon spokesman, Lt. Col. Barry Venable, told The New York Times in Sunday's editions that the report was not a comprehensive accounting of Iraqi casualties. He said the count did not provide separate figures for the number of killed or wounded and how many of those were civilians, police officers or soldiers.

<http://go.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=10096831&src=rss/topNews>
(more at link above)