Iraq insurgency kills 12k

The Washington Post reports:

Violence in the course of the 18-month-long insurgency has claimed the lives of 12,000 Iraqis, Interior Minister Bayan Jabr said Thursday, giving the first official count for the largest category of victims of bombings, ambushes and other increasingly deadly attacks.

...The figure breaks down to an average of more than 20 civilians killed by bombings and other attacks each day. Authorities estimate that more than 10,500 of the victims were Shiite Muslims, based on the locations of the deaths, Jabr said.

There have been 1,663 U.S. military deaths since the United States led the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, according to the Pentagon's official count. Bombings and other insurgent strikes have killed thousands of Iraqi security force members. No official totals have been released for those dead, or for the total number of civilian casualties since the start of the war. The U.S. military says it does not keep a comprehensive tally of people it has killed in combat, although it has released numbers of dead in major operations and has acknowledged civilians it has killed if it has become generally known that those people died during a U.S. firefight or attack.

This last paragraph notes that there's no accurate tabulation for civilians killed by US forces. Quite true, but it's worth recalling that between April and September 2004 the US killed two times the number of civilians as the insurgency. Similar numbers emerged out of the period between July 2004 and January 2005, but the Iraqi health ministry disputed the conclusions the BBC drew from the numbers. The BBC broke the story about the figures on its Panorama program.

I mention this not to rationalize the deaths at the hands of the insurgency, but to point out that if you think 12K is a high toll -- and it is -- it's quite likely that the US has been killing far more civilians.

Mind you, I don't like it when car bombs slam into funeral processions or mosques, but my energy is best reserved for speaking out against the actions of my own government, which has the audacity to cry about terrorists throughout Iraq even after it has strangled the country for a decade with sanctions and generously rained additional war crimes upon the Iraqi people for the past ~3 years.