Sweeping statistics on insurgent violence in Iraq that were declassified for a Senate hearing on Wednesday appear to portray a rebellion whose ability to mount attacks has steadily grown in the nearly three years since the invasion.
The statistics were included in a report written by Joseph Christoff, director of international affairs and trade at the Government Accountability Office, who testified before the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee during a hearing on Iraq stabilization and reconstruction.
The US military declassified the statistics so he could present them to the hearing in his report, Christoff said in an interview. The figures cover attacks on US and Iraqi forces and civilians.
The curve traced out by the figures between June 2003 and December 2005 shows a number of fluctuations, including several large spikes in insurgent activity -- one as recently as October of last year.
But while US and Iraqi officials have often pointed to the downward edges of those fluctuations as evidence that the steam was going out of the insurgency, the numbers over all seem to tell a different story, Christoff said.
"It's not going down," he said. "There are peaks and valleys, but if you look at every peak, it's higher than the peak before."
Officials have recently noted that the numbers of attacks in the final two months of last year dropped after an October peak, which occurred around both Ramadan and a referendum on Iraq's constitution.
But Christoff's chart shows that the number of attacks in December, numbering nearly 2,500, was almost 250 percent higher than the number in March 2004.
The trend line began even before March 2004, when the number of attacks was already nearly double what it had been in July or August 2003. Christoff's paper cites a senior US military officer saying that "attack levels ebb and flow as the various insurgent groups -- almost all of which are an intrinsic part of Iraq's population -- re-arm and attack again."
Attacks against Iraqi security forces have grown faster than the overall count; by December 2005 they had grown more than 300 percent since March 2004. Of course, as more Iraqis are trained and put into the field, more of them are targets.
The paper, citing a contracting office in Iraq, said that as attacks had fluctuated downward in the final two months of last year, attacks on convoys related to rebuilding efforts had risen.
Twenty convoys had been attacked, resulting in 11 casualties, in October last year, while 33 convoys had been attacked, with 34 casualties, last month, the paper says.
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
A US federal judge on Tuesday ordered US President Donald Trump’s administration to halt efforts to shut down Voice of America (VOA), Radio Free Asia and Middle East Broadcasting Networks, the news broadcasts of which are funded by the government to export US values to the world. US District Judge Royce Lamberth, who is overseeing six lawsuits from employees and contractors affected by the shutdown of the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM), ordered the administration to “take all necessary steps” to restore employees and contractors to their positions and resume radio, television and online news broadcasts. USAGM placed more than 1,000
RSS