453 bodies found in Baghdad during June

BAGHDAD – Nearly five months into a security strategy that involves thousands of additional U.S. and Iraqi troops patrolling Baghdad, the number of unidentified bodies found on the streets of the capital was 41 percent higher in June than in January, according to unofficial Health Ministry statistics.

During the month of June, 453 unidentified corpses, some bound, blindfolded and bearing signs of torture, were found in Baghdad, according to morgue data provided by a Health Ministry official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to release the information. In January, 321 corpses were discovered in the capital, a total that fell steadily until April but then rose sharply over the last two months, the statistics show.

Overall, the level of violent civilian deaths in Iraq is declining, according to the U.S. military and Health Ministry statistics, and there has been a steady drop in fatalities from mass-casualty bombings that have torn through outdoor markets, university bus stops and crowds assembled to collect food rations.

But the number of unidentified bodies found on the streets is considered a key indicator of the malignancy of sectarian strife.

“That’s the cancer that keeps eating the neighborhoods,” Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. military commander in Iraq, said at a meeting with reporters Saturday. “It never stops. It’s a tit for tat. It’s a cycle of violence that has to be broken.”

These individual slayings are often attributed to Shiite militias and described as revenge killings or acts of sectarian cleansing in response to catastrophic suicide bombings by the Sunni insurgent group al-Qaida in Iraq. But such characterizations oversimplify a landscape of violence that includes Sunnis executing individual Shiites, and attackers dispatching their victims for other criminal, personal or political motives.

One of the main goals of the Baghdad security plan, launched in mid-February as the first of nearly 30,000 additional American soldiers arrived in Iraq, was to halt sectarian murders.

But even before the plan went into effect, the number of bodies discovered had fallen well below the levels of last fall. In October 2006, for instance, 1,782 unidentified bodies were found in Baghdad, according to the United Nations, citing official statistics provided by the Health Ministry.

Victims of sectarian killings are often difficult to identify because ID cards are taken before the bodies, often disfigured or beheaded, are dumped in the streets. In Iraq, people disappear in countless ways; some are pulled out of cars or living rooms by gunmen.

Families are left to search morgues and hospitals and sometimes pay exorbitant sums for information about their missing relatives.