Iraq: USCENTCOM and Iraqi Government Estimates of the Trends in the Patterns in Violence and Casualties

The last few weeks have been filled with grim reports of suicide and bombing attacks in Iraq. They serve as a warning that the struggle against al Qaeda in Iraq, Shi’ite extremists in the Mahdi Army, and other causes of civil violence are not over. As U.S. officials and commanders have repeatedly warned, the situation is “fragile” at best.

At the same time, one has to be very careful about riding the headlines in assessing violence in Iraq. As ABC has reported, an Iraqi official has now released Iraqi estimates of the level of violence in Iraq, outside Kurdistan, and detailed estimates of the causes of violence and casualty levels in Baghdad. When these are compared with earlier data provide by USCENTCOM, they reveal both how far Iraq has come and how far it still has to go. They are also show that the recent bombings are only part of the story and that estimates based either on the number of bombings or total killed tell only part of the story.