Prompted by the front page story on the very bloody week that Iraq has just gone through, I decided to revisit something I did a couple of months ago, and look at the trends in the violence in Iraq. Have we, in fact, turned the corner? Are things getting worse? Look below the flip to find out...
First, the source of the data. All of the raw numbers came from the Iraqi Coalition Casualty Count. The information on US casualties came from
here and the information on Iraqi military/police and civilian casualties from
here. US casualties were tracked as of the beginning of the war. Iraqi military/police casualties were tracked as of Jan 1, 2005, and Iraqi civilian casualties as of March 1,2005.
The data:
Key to the graphs: The red represents daily death tolls, sometimes in single attacks and sometimes a combination of two or more. The blue is a 1 month sliding average, essentially showing an average loss rate, and the green is the total number of casualties suffered to date. Of the three, the blue is probably the most useful to look at
Analysis
OK, so what does this all mean? First, let's look at the US losses. Essentialy, we've reached a steady-state of a few soldiers being killed every day, on average. Of course, this doesn't tell the entire story of the level of stress that the Army is under, between the much larger number of wounded and the overall problems associated with longer and longer deployments.
Next, look at the Iraqi military/police. This, plus the US army, gives us an idea of the losses of the fighting troops. Here, we find that there is a long-term upward trend to the loss rate. It's still only a few per day, but if you compare March with July, the rate has nearly doubled. Part of that can possibly be ascribed to increased numbers and involvement of the police and military, but not all.
Finally, the people who really get screwed, the Iraqi civilians. There's a sharp uptick in the civilian toll starting in early May, and the violence hasn't subsided since then. This can only be blamed on an increase in the number or lethality of insurgent attacks, and is probably the clearest sign that the insurgency isn't going away anytime soon.
So, the overall conclusion: Based on the civilian casualties, the insurgency is stronger, or at least more active, now then they were 3 months ago. It's hard to be sure, but a comparison of the US and Iraqi military casualties suggests that the Iraqi military is taking a somewhat larger share of the combat load, or at the very least is soaking up a larger fraction of the losses.
In my previous diary on this subject, I highlighted the date March 13, 2005, as the only day in two months that didn't see any fatal attacks. It is now the only day in roughly 5 months to have that distinction. If this is a "last throe", I don't want to see what a rested and ready insurgency can do.
I don't have any answers or magic bullets, but we need to get out of this quagmire ASAP.
-dms
