Kucinich-Paul Congressional Hearing on Civilian Casualties in Iraq

December 11, 2006 Monday

NEWS CONFERENCE WITH REPRESENTATIVE DENNIS KUCINICH (D-OH) AND REPRESENTATIVE RON PAUL (R-TX); TOPIC: CIVILIAN CASUALTIES IN IRAQ OTHER; PARTICIPANTS: DR. GILBERT BURNHAM, M.D., CO-DIRECTOR, CENTER FOR REFUGEE AND DISASTER RESPONSE, JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY JUAN COLE, PROFESSOR OF MODERN MIDDLE EAST HISTORY, UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN LES ROBERTS, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR, CLINICAL PUBLIC HEALTH, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY; LOCATION: 2247 RAYBURN HOUSE OFFICE BUILDING, WASHINGTON, D.C.

BODY:

NEWS CONFERENCE WITH REPRESENTATIVE DENNIS KUCINICH (D-OH) AND REPRESENTATIVE RON PAUL (R-TX) TOPIC: CIVILIAN CASUALTIES IN IRAQ OTHER PARTICIPANTS: DR. GILBERT BURNHAM, M.D., CO-DIRECTOR, CENTER FOR REFUGEE AND DISASTER RESPONSE, JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY JUAN COLE, PROFESSOR OF MODERN MIDDLE EAST HISTORY, UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN LES ROBERTS, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR, CLINICAL PUBLIC HEALTH, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY LOCATION: 2247

RAYBURN HOUSE OFFICE BUILDING, WASHINGTON, D.C. TIME: 10:06 A.M. EST DATE: MONDAY, DECEMBER 11, 2006

REP. KUCINICH: (Without microphone.) Okay. Thank you very much for being here this morning for this congressional oversight briefing on Iraq, in particular -- we'll start over. Thank you. Thank you very much for being here this morning for this congressional oversight briefing on Iraq -- in particular, the impact of 650,000 excess deaths in Iraq. And we're going to do an overview of the Lancet mortality study in Iraq.

I want to begin by thanking Congressman Ron Paul for being willing to cosponsor this briefing. Mr. Paul and I have worked very closely together on a wide range of issues relating to the conduct of war in Iraq and now to the issue that relates to the civilian casualties. Ron Paul has been an essential part of a bipartisan coalition that aimed at bringing our troops home as quickly as possible. So I want to publicly express my appreciation for the partnership with Mr. Paul, and I look forward to continuing to work with him in the next Congress.

Today we have a number of authors who have been active on this issue of the civilian casualties and who are going to be making presentations with respect to their own studies. I want to briefly make the introductions. I'll then make a statement. And then we will proceed to their statements, and then we're going to have a discussion among all the panelists, with me leading the way with questions.

First of all, to my left is Juan Cole.

Dr. Cole is a Ph.D. and has a background in modern Middle East and South Asian history. He is from the University of Michigan, and he is the person who runs a blog called Informed Comment. To my right is Dr. Gilbert Burnham. Dr. Burnham is a Ph.D. and an M.D. He is a co- director of the Center for Refugee and Disaster Response at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. And finally, concluding the panel is Les Roberts, also a Ph.D. He's an associate professor of Clinical Public Health at the Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University.

This is a distinguished panel, and I'm very grateful, as is Mr. Paul, that we have the chance to bring these men forward to have the opportunity of discussing this. And I'm also reminded that Drs. Burnham and Roberts are the authors of the Lancet study, and we're going to be discussing the Lancet study in great detail.

Of the many tragedies in Iraq, the massive rise in Iraqi deaths -- there's not good enough attention in the United States. We are rapidly approaching the grave number of 3,000 dead U.S. service members. But as painful as that is -- and it's very painful -- the estimated 650,000 deaths attributed to hostilities in Iraq is an overwhelming number to comprehend. While it is natural and appropriate for Americans to first focus upon the deaths of American service members in Iraq, it's astounding to consider that for every service member killed, 200 Iraq civilians have been killed.

According to the United Nations, the population of Iraq was 25 million in 2003, and we have now learned that since then, an estimated 650,000 have perished to violence. Now, if such a rate of violence were to be inflicted against the U.S., we would have lost about 7.8 million Americans. Such a level of violence is unimaginable, but this is the level of violence that the civilians in Iraq are subjected to.

Consider the massive psychological impact the 9/11 attacks and resulting deaths have had on our nation. Imagine the impact we'd feel as a nation if, over a period of three years, 7.8 million of our citizens died in ongoing, uncontrollable violence. Consider the political impact of violence at that scale. Are we closer to a stable transition in Iraq, or are we closer to collapse? How would we react if this was happening here?

With the help of Congressman Paul, I've assembled a panel of experts to help us grasp the civilian situation in Iraq and its impact on Iraq's society. I hope to explore many vexing questions by leading a discussion with the experts who are here with us today. What confidence do we have in the U.S. administration responses on the number of Iraqi fatalities? Who is getting killed by whom, and why? What does this violence do to the prospects of peace in Iraq? What are the short-term and long-term implications of this massive number of deaths to Iraqi civil society? Will the millions of Iraqi children who have lost a parent ever forgive our country for igniting this violence? How do we make peace with the generations of Iraqis severely harmed by this unnecessary war of choice?

We have to ask these questions. We have to understand what the Iraqi citizenry thinks and feels to understand why this violence has escalated far beyond our control.

Now, I have no doubt that the best course of action for our nation is to extract ourselves from Iraq as fast as possible, while enabling the United Nations to establish a peacekeeping force. Such action would remove our troops from harm's way, remove the largest impetus for the violence, and begin the healing process, which will take decades to complete.

Our president does not seem to understand the necessity to get out of Iraq. Thus, it is imperative that Congress do the one thing the Constitution of the United States provides for: Congress must cut off future war funds, and demand that the president use the current funds in the pipeline from the October 1st $70 billion appropriation to bring the troops home.

This war was unnecessary. We went to war based on false information. Meanwhile, the number of casualties keeps growing -- not only with U.S. troops, but today we're going to discuss the number of casualties inflicted upon innocent Iraqi civilians.

This is why we have the authors who are present here, and these are authors of the best study that has yet to come forward on the issue of civilian casualties in Iraq.

Now with that, I would like to turn to -- Dr. Cole, would you like to go first -- or let's do this. Let's go to Mr. Burnham first. Yeah, let's have the authors go first. Let's go to -- begin with Dr. Gilbert Burnham, who is, along with Dr. Les Roberts, co-author of the Lancet study on the number of civilian casualties in Iraq. So I want to welcome you, Dr. Burnham, and thank you very much for being here to inform the American people as to the dimensions of this tragedy.

DR. BURNHAM: Thank you very much, Representative Kucinich, because I appreciate you and Representative Paul making this forum possible to discuss our findings, and I'd like to start off by just giving an overview of the study itself and then I'll pass onto Dr. Roberts to talk about some of the implications from the findings that we had.

First off, I'd like to say that sampling is pretty much a standard way of getting information for health, and what we read about numbers on health by in large comes from samples. So this is an established process, and we should also say that if we're looking at figures that affect the nation, this requires a national survey. This is not something that can be done from a collection of information here and there, particularly in conflict-affected populations.

The first question that we have to ask when we're thinking about a survey is how many people do we have to have in a survey to have valid results from this. And that very much depends upon -- the question is: What do you want to show? And our intent was to look at a survey that would measure with confidence at least a doubling in the death rate that occurred before the time of invasion.

Now, we could also say how much precision is necessary, how exact do we need to have this answer, or are we willing to accept an answer that is in a nearby neighborhood, but not exactly right on. And that depends upon the numbers that we can acquire in a particular country. But I would say in this survey we collected more than enough data to measure a doubling of the death rates that occurred before the time of invasion.

Now, there are some considerations about how do we find people to interview. And one of the basic premises of sampling is everyone has to have an equal opportunity to be included in the survey, and the survey must be as free of biases as is possible. So one spends a lot of time trying to think about how to minimize the biases.

So our intent in the survey -- people often ask us why did you do the survey -- our intent was to look at how populations that are caught up in conflict, how they are affected by this war. And the method that we wanted to use was to compare the death rates that occurred in the households before the invasion as to the time after the invasion. So this is comparing people with their own households before and after the invasion.

Now, in a survey, there's a couple of ways to do things. One is if you have a list of everybody in the country, then you can randomly select out of that list. And that's a very good way to do it, but there are very few countries where you have a listing of everybody in the country. So an alternative is what's known as a cluster survey. And this is a standard method that's used throughout the world. And in this type of survey, one collects samples from a certain number of clusters. Commonly this is 30 -- that's been found to be the most satisfactory number -- but in certain circumstances you may want to increase it. And we did 47 surveys -- clusters. And in each of these clusters, then, we would look at a certain number of households. This is a standard way to do things. And we also had the intent in the survey to compare the results with the results of the 2004 survey, which we did measuring the same period of time, but up until September of 2004.

So we how carried out the survey was to do 47 clusters equally distributed across the country.

So Baghdad, which had about a fifth of the population of the country, had a fifth of the clusters in it and so on. And once we identified a cluster, then we would select at random an administrative unit within that cluster, and then once we had that, we would select a neighborhood at random in that administrative area, and once we selected that neighborhood, then we would find a household at random in that neighborhood. And starting at that household, we would interview that household and then the 39 nearest households. And we would ask them about movement into the household, out of the household, birth and death, and where there were deaths reported, then we would ask them details about these deaths, and these had to be deaths of people that were in that household for three months. So this was not just people passing through. They had to be part of that household.

And then at the end of that survey where there was a death in the household, we asked, "By the way, do you have a death certificate?" And in 91 percent of households where this was asked, the households had death certificates. So we're confident that people were not making up deaths that didn't occur.

So in the process of this survey, we found 629 deaths over the period of time from January of 2002 until July of 2006, and these were converted to rates, so that meant number of deaths per thousand people per year. And then those rates were in turn applied to the population of the study area. And there were two of the governorates, or two of the provinces, that were not included in the survey, so we did not include those in the estimation. So we took those rates and applied to them a population of 26.1 million people. And from that, we could calculate the number of deaths that occurred above what would be expected if the population was in a normal situation without any violence going on, and in those circumstances there would have been a large number of deaths occurring every year anyway from heart attacks, from old age, from malignancies, from automobile accidents and so forth.

So what we came up with is what we considered to be a(n) excess mortality or number of extra deaths that would not have occurred if the conflict had not happened. And from this, we came up with an estimate of 650,000 excess deaths over the 40 months post-invasion. Now, around that, we have what the statisticians call a confidence interval, and that is an interval in which we are 95 percent sure that the correct or true answer lies.

So in the handout, I have a little graph here, and it shows that our best estimate is 650,000 excess deaths.

But if we were to say what happens if the true number were only 500,000, we would say that the chance of that number being 500,000 is about 10 percent. So it's a one out of 10 chance of being that.

The lowest end of the confidence interval is 390,000, and the chance of that being the correct answer is less than 2-1/2 percent.

So we're confident this is a large number, and we're confident that 650,000 represents the best estimate for the number of excess deaths.

Now, if we took that number apart, and we looked at what proportion of those are due to violent causes, then we've come up with a number of 601,000 due to violent causes. So these excess deaths that we saw in Iraq during this period of time were by and large due to violent causes, by the vast majority of these.

Now, as I mentioned earlier on, we did a survey in the year 2004, a smaller survey. But it gave us an opportunity to compare the results from this survey with the results from the survey in 2004, which covered that same period of time from the invasion up until 2004. And we found almost exactly the same results. These were different households, different communities, different neighborhoods, different cities, and we had virtually exactly the same results. So we're very confident in this.

So if we could summarize what the numbers are saying that we collected, we're saying that the vast majority of deaths are due to violent causes, and we could say this -- these violent deaths are spread across the country.

Now, most of the information we see on television and in the print comes from Baghdad. That's the most accessible area. We found that Baghdad was not by any means the most violent area. So we found also that, as I say, violence has spread right across the country.

The vast majority of these deaths were in males, although there was an interesting look at deaths among pre- -- children under age 15. And that was increased perhaps out of proportion to what I might have expected. And one could suppose th
at this represented schoolchildren -- school -- children out playing, not so much as with the older female population that could stay in the house most of the time.

We found that gunfire remains the major cause of death. About half of deaths are due to gunfire.

Then we asked households: Who do you think is responsible for the death of this household member? Now, in the earlier years after the invasion, households were a bit more confident or a bit more willing to say who they felt was responsible.

But in the last year, it's become a much more confused situation. People are not able to identify who is responsible for deaths of their family member or for some reason they're unwilling to discuss this. But overall, households attributed about 20 percent of the deaths to coalition forces, and if there were circumstances where the households were not sure whether the coalition were responsible or not, we left those out of the calculation. And I remind you, this is just what households told us about things, but at that level, about a fifth of deaths were attributed to the coalition as far as percentages.

Now, we've also seen an escalation in the number of deaths. So if we looked at the total number of deaths that were perhaps attributed to the coalition, that number would be rising as years went along.

And finally, I'd like to say, like any kind of research study, this has limitations. There are potentials for bias and there are potentials for sampling problems. We spent months and months and months thinking about these potential biases and limitations before hand and designed a study to minimize these limitations in every way possible, and now looking at the data afterwards, I think we've done a good job at minimizing those kinds of limitations. It's possible that households concealed deaths, and if they concealed deaths, that would have been -- underestimated the number of deaths. So perhaps the number might even be higher if there were concealed deaths.

And finally, there's migration going on in the country that upsets the estimate on the number of people in the country, although we use the 2004 U.N. and Ministry of Planning estimate. Now with mass migration that is changing a bit. That could have some affect on things as well.

However, Congressman Kucinich, I believe that these data represent, as you say, the best estimate that is possible under the circumstances. After the study had been published, we spent a lot of time reviewing the results and the scrutiny that this got both in the scientific literature and in the popular press, and I think we are as confident as we ever were on the results, and we're willing to stand firmly behind the results that we published in October.

REP. KUCINICH: Thank you very much, Dr. Burnham. And I'll wait until each member of the panel makes his presentation, and then, we'll go to questions.

At this point, I would like to introduce Dr. Roberts, who is co- author of the Lancet study. Thank you, Dr. Roberts, for your presence here.

MR. ROBERTS: Well, I'd like to start by thanking Congressmen Paul and Kucinich very much for creating this forum to discuss the increasing mortality among Iraqis, and I'd like to start out with a question. What if what Gil Burnham just described is correct; that is, what if 600,000 Iraqis have died because of this preemptive venture? Would Congress have approved this had they known in advance?

Can the press pretend they've done even a credible job of reporting in Iraq, if they have consistently downplayed the number of deaths by a factor of 10? Can we in academia and in those think tanks around Washington pretend that we add value to discourse in society if something almost identical in magnitude to the Rwandan genocide could go more or less unnoticed by our society?

Unfortunately, I'm here today to tell you that there is a lot of evidence from Iraq that our estimate is correct. For example, if Iraq was one of the healthiest countries in the world, had a mortality rate like we measured -- like the U.S. Census estimates to be, there'd have to be 140,000 deaths from natural causes a year -- people dying of old age, birth defects. That means about half a million deaths since the occupation began. Our report is saying that over this period, actually a slight majority of all deaths have been from violence. If the most commonly cited source in the media, the Iraqi body count estimate, or if the Brookings Institution, or of the U.N. is correct, there would only be about 10 percent of all deaths in Iraq from violence. And every newspaper report I see, the data from the Baghdad morgue, a couple of Iraqi physicians I've spoken to from a village near Abu Ghraib and from Basra, all tell me in their areas the vast majority of deaths are from violence. This alone means the number must be more than half a million since the occupation began.

If our Lancet report is correct, we're saying that right now there's maybe three times as many bodies coming into graveyards and morgues across Iraq as there were back in 2002. And if Iraqi body count and Brookings are correct, it would only be about 10 percent more than there were back in 2002. Again, every report, including an article last Wednesday in The New York Times talking about how over- stressed ambulance drives are, sort of confirms that it's not just 10 percent more deaths than used to occur in 2002.

Interestingly, the Iraqi minister of Health had been supporting this 40,000 to 50,000 death estimate until our study came out, and he changed it to perhaps 100,000 to 150,000 the week our study came out.

And since then, he's been quoted by AP as saying more like 150,000, not the 600,000 reported in the Lancet. He tripled his estimate as a result of our study coming out. Can anyone pretend the Iraqi minister of health really knows?

According to the United Nations, the Iraqi government surveillance network reported exactly zero violent deaths from Anbar province in the month of July, in spite of all the contradictory evidence we saw if we watched CNN. The most widely cited sources -- IBC, the United Nations, Brookings -- report about 80 percent of all violent deaths coming from Baghdad. And as Dr. Burnham mentioned, Baghdad actually is only about as violent as the nation on average.

So here it is -- one-fifth of the country reporting four-fifths of all violent deaths, and we know their rate of violent deaths isn't any higher than the rest. Something is wrong with those sources.

Similar incompleteness has been noted by the coalition surveillance activities. The Baker-Hamilton report of last week on page 95 said, and I quote, "For example, on one day of July in 2006, there were 93 attacks or significant acts of violence reported, yet a careful review of the reports for that single day brought to light 1,100 violent acts."

We feel our estimate is by far the best available, in spite of considerable imprecision. We also feel that in terms of understanding the situation in Iraq, in terms of moving forward, it's important to know, has one in seven houses in Iraq lost a loved one, or one in a hundred, as Iraqi body counts would suggest.

You know, we're the society that eradicated smallpox from the face of the earth primarily by setting up surveillance networks, including during really violent conflicts in East Pakistan and Somalia and Biafra. We're the society that produced most of the medical developments that are taught in medical schools around the world. We gave the world the Internet. As a nation of information excellence it is, I think, beneath our dignity and, I hope, not in keeping with the compassion of the American people to have U.S. government officials consistently downplaying the number of dead in Iraq by a factor of 10 and 15.

And we look forward to assisting you in further exploring this important issue. Thank you.

REP. KUCINICH: Thank you very much, Dr. Roberts, for that presentation.

I'd now like to introduce Dr. Cole and -- of the University of Michigan. Thank you for being here, Dr. Cole.

MR. COLE: Well, I'm very grateful to Representatives Kucinich and Paul for this opportunity to address this important issue.

Ladies and gentlemen, I speak here today about the social and political context of the violence in Iraq. Based on my daily and extensive reading of the Iraqi press and Western reporting, I believe that the seemingly high numbers for excess Iraqi deaths owing to political violence and criminal violence since 2003, reported in the 2006 Lancet study, are nevertheless plausible.

Let me just give you some case studies to show what I'm talking about, because it's often -- the report has been criticized with regard to statistics to reported deaths that appear in the press. I want to emphasize to you that the press just isn't reporting very many of the actual deaths in Iraq.

For instance, security clearly collapsed in the southern Shi'ite city of Basra, population 1.3 million, in spring of 2006. Iraqi officials maintained in April that for the previous month, one Iraqi had been assassinated each hour. This is in the city of Basra, one city.

These -- some 750 deaths had gone completely unreported in both the Iraqi and the Western press. If you go back and do a Lexis search for Basra in March and April of 2006, you won't see any deaths reported at all there.

It is not clear that the al-Maliki government's deployment to Basra of the 10th Army Division this past summer made much of a difference in the violence, which is committed by militias and tribal mafias fighting turf wars over petroleum smuggling and other sources of wealth. It is entirely possible that the 750 a month are still dying in Basra, but that these deaths are going unreported. Again, if you just look at the daily wire service reports coming out of Iraq, these kinds of deaths for Basra are not being mentioned.

Families are often afraid to draw attention to themselves by publicly reporting deaths in guerrilla violence, and sometimes they're even afraid to retrieve the body of a loved one from the morgue, lest morgue officials report them to the guerrillas for a bribe.

The estimate given by the Iraqi Health Ministry on November 9th, 2006, of 150,000 Iraqis killed since the war began by -- actually, according to what the Health minister said, was with regard to deaths caused by Sunni Arab insurgents.

He was very specific in the cause of the death of that he was announcing. So it wasn't a global estimate of 150,000. As I understood it, it was from that particular source.

So we add in the number of deaths from criminal activity -- and there's quite a lot in Iraq -- from Shi'ite militias, which the Ministry of Health didn't refer to, and from U.S. military action. Actually, the Health Ministry is probably pretty close to the Lancet estimate, if you extrapolate it out.

Let's just consider the humanitarian disaster in a place like Diyala province northeast of Baghdad. This is a mixed region near to Iran with a population of 1.3 million. It has a Sunni Arab preponderance, but it has Shi'ites and Kurds. In the provincial elections of January 2005, the Sunnis boycotted the polls. As a result, the provincial council consists of 20 Shi'ites, 14 Sunnis and seven Kurds. The Shi'ites have the predominance on the council, and they therefore have brought in their guys in the police, in the army and so forth. So the governor and the police chief of Baqubah, the capital of the province, are Shi'ites. The Shi'ites dominated local police, have been supported in recent weeks by the 5th Army Division, which is Shi'ite and commanded by a Shi'ite officer.

Sunni Arabs have organized local militias in their districts to keep the police and army out. This is being coded as lawlessness by the U.S. press and military, but it is actually a rejection of dominance by the new elected Shi'ite political elite. And the U.S. military is careful to say that it is not supporting one side or another in the sectarian violence in Diyala; it says we're just supporting the elected government. Well, as it happens, the elected government is mainly Shi'ite, so the U.S. military actually is supporting one side.

The reports coming out from Baqubah and Diyala generally through November are -- show a steady drumbeat of violence.

On Sunday, November 5th, in response to the announcement of the death sentence for Saddam Hussein, hundreds or perhaps thousands of unarmed Sunni Arab protestors gathered in Baqubah carrying posters of Saddam. They also raised banners criticizing the al-Maliki government. It's often alleged by the Shi'ites that Baqubah is a hotbed for al Qaeda, but here we have the Sunni Arabs showing support for the secular Saddam. Local police fired into the crowd, allegedly killing 20 and wounding 23. These are largely Shi'ite police firing on Sunni Arab protesters. The Times of Baghdad, al-Zaman, branded the repression "a massacre."

And most days through November, you find reports like that on November 13th. CBS News reported 50 bodies were found, discarded like trash in Baqubah. On the same day, 40 bodies that had accumulated in the morgue had not been claimed were buried. On November 15th, AP reported that Iraqi police, backed by U.S. forces, discovered the bodies of 10 kidnap victims found blindfolded with gunshots in a house in Baqubah.

And then major violence broke out in mid-November. On Saturday, November 18th, Sunni Arab guerrillas in Baqubah attacked a police checkpoint, killing two policemen and wounding two others, and then opened fire on residents -- these are Shi'ite residents -- after pulling them from their homes or automobiles. They shot at Shi'ite seasonal workers returning to Baghdad from orchards in the east of Baqubah, killing eight; in response, U.S. and Iraqi Army forces fought the guerrillas for many hours in the street. And again, the Iraq army that's been deployed to Baqubah is the 5th Division, which is largely Shi'ite.

Rocket-propelled grenades and light-arms fire caromed through the city, leaving 18 persons dead and 19 wounded. It was unclear how many of the casualties were guerrillas. On Sunday, the curfew was lifted, but the main street was closed off. The guerrillas still had control over four districts in Baqubah. They attacked another police checkpoint. The police said that in a separate incident, guerrillas loyal to Muqtada al-Sadr set fire to numerous shops in the market in revenge for attacks on their own offices in the city. Al-Zaman's correspondent in Baqubah -- this a major Iraqi newspaper -- wrote on Monday, November 20th that the city, he said, "is living through a powerless security situation. Police patrols disappear from the principal streets early in the day and various armed groups thereafter have enormous sway." Reuters reported the same day that a senior police officer who declined to be named said, quote, "There is not a day that passes without dozens of people being killed either from bombs, shootings or assassinations. This has been going for months."

And I want to underline that no newspaper or wire service is reporting dozens of daily deaths in Baqubah that so many are being missed lends credence to the higher estimates for the deaths in the Lancet study.

Many days no deaths at all are reported, sometimes only one or two make the news. But this senior police officer, an eyewitness, maintains
that dozens are dying every day.

And this story that I'm telling goes on through November into December. And reports are coming in from little towns around Baqubah; it's not just the capital. On November 26th, it was reported that police found 21 bodies of Shi'ites in Balad Ruz, a mainly Sunni city. On November 26th, AFP reported that guerrillas in the small town of Kanan (ph) in Diyala, 12 miles south of Baqubah, kidnapped at least 20 Iraqis of mixed tribe and sect. Usually the kidnapped don't show back up alive. On November 27th, it was reported in the Arabic press that Sunni Arab guerrillas fought a pitched battle with police in the city of Buhriz near Baqubah, defeated them, chased them out of their headquarters, and set it on fire and completely took over the city. So the guerrillas pushed the police out.

Now, the story that I'm telling you could be told for other areas of Iraq, not just Diyala. The so-called "Triangle of Death" in Babil province, just south of Baghdad, which includes towns like Yusufiya, Mahmudiyah, Iskandariyah, Latifiyah, see similar kinds of daily grind of violence. A lot of the killing seems to be just people shooting people down. The press tends to favor reports of car-bombings, but car-bombings produce a relatively small percentage of the deaths. It's mostly just sniping and gunfire at one another.

News-gathering in contemporary Iraq is extremely dangerous and difficult. The collection and publication of social statistics has been affected by the violence and the anxieties that it spawns. Scientifically weighted household surveys are one instrument to supplement the desultory and staccato news reports about casualties in Iraq. It is clear that the level of sectarian violence and reprisals has increased substantially since February of 2006, when Sunni Arab guerrillas blew up the Askariya shrine in Samarra, among the holiest of the sites for the Shi'ites.

The violence is now being pursued at the neighborhood and clan level, often at night or in dense urban tenements, such that the U.S. military appears unable to stop it. Indeed, the presence of so many U.S. troops in Iraq and the way in which they're often dragged willy- nilly into sectarian fights, such as Diyala, is probably impeding the natural process whereby Iraqis would be forced to compromise with one another.

Thank you.

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