Is the worst over? We all certainly hope so. I’m very anxious to see how the coming months go in terms of reducing the violence in Iraq, so I keep checking in on the civilian casualty statistics. Since I’m too impatient to wait until the end of January, here are the results with the January results prorated based on the first 12 days of the month.
The trend is promising, though painfully slow. If Maliki manages to live up to his strong rhetoric, we could see a faster decline even in this month. But that’s a long shot.
January 13, 2007 at 2:27 am
There is THIS interesting story I saw over at Jules’s.
If Taheri is right, much of this violence was a direct result of democrat waffling and lack of resolve. Given the Arab psyche and tendency to back the “strong horse”, it sounds entirely plausible.
January 23, 2007 at 10:38 pm
Care to update this post?
Am I reading the data right from this site? Looks like we’re now on track for 1700+ dead Iraqi civilians by the end of the month.
January 24, 2007 at 4:13 am
I’ll update it at the end of the month. Those major attacks brought the numbers up quite a bit over the past week. Obviously none of the violent groups likes the idea of a crackdown.
But you sound kind of pleased with the increase in casualties. What’s up with that?
January 26, 2007 at 8:06 am
Of course I’m not pleased. How could you possibly read that into my comment?
January 26, 2007 at 10:23 am
Of course I’m not pleased. How could you possibly read that into my comment?
It was just your eagerness to see the higher numbers plotted. Seems like you couldn’t wait.
January 26, 2007 at 3:02 pm
To be honest, I wasn’t sure if I was reading the correct numbers from your source, which is why I was asking if I was reading the data correctly from that site. I had read that civilian deaths were down but your source seemed to say otherwise (I only came back to your blog because I remembered you had a good source for this data, which I now have bookmarked).
How could anyone possibly be eager to see an increase in the death of innocent people?
January 26, 2007 at 5:32 pm
Sorry if I misread your “Care to update this post?” comment, but it sounded pushy and snarky to me. In fact it still does.
Be careful with the ICC numbers – they’re useful for comparative purposes, but they are likely to be low by up to a factor of 2.