They’re dying at an unprecendented rate over the last two months.
A car bomb also exploded outside a U.S. base near the volatile city of Baqouba, leaving a number of troops gasping for air and suffering from eye irritations, the military said. It did not confirm a report in the Los Angeles Times that the car was carrying chlorine canisters and said the soldiers who were sickened had been treated and returned to duty.
This is from the Reuters daily roundup story:
* BAGHDAD – The U.S military announced the deaths of 14 soldiers, almost all of them in the Baghdad area or in the volatile province of Diyala in the past 72 hours. All but two were killed by roadside bombs.
* BAGHDAD – The bodies of 31 people were found in Baghdad in the past 24 hours, the victims of apparent sectarian death squads, police said.
BAGHDAD – Ayad Shahab Ahmed, a director of the Iraqi Central Bank, and his brother were killed in a drive-by shooting in the Amil district of southwestern Baghdad, police said.
* KIRKUK – Two civilians were killed in drive-by shooting in central Kirkuk, police said. Gunmen in a car opened fire on a crowd of people.
NEAR BAQUBA – The bodies of nine people were found shot and bound south of Baquba, police said.
And the sectarian death toll is absolutely soaring at the time Bush and various politicians, all of them GOP (except for Lieberman) continue to lie and say the opposite.
BAGHDAD, June 2 (Reuters) – The number of civilians killed in Iraq jumped to nearly 2,000 in May, the highest monthly toll since the start of a U.S.-backed security crackdown in February, according to figures released on Saturday.
Militants blew up a strategic bridge that links Baghdad to the northern cities of Kirkuk and Arbil, and a mortar barrage on the Sunni enclave of Fadhil in mainly Shi’ite eastern Baghdad, killed 10 people and wounded 30, police said.
In Arbil, the capital of Iraq’s autonomous Kurdistan region, Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki and Masoud Barzani, president of Kurdistan, urged Turkey not to send troops into the region to crush Kurdish separatist rebels believed to be hiding there.
An Interior Ministry official, who did not want to be named because he was not authorised to release the figures, said 1,944 civilians were killed in May, a 29 percent hike over April. At least 174 soldiers and policemen were killed in the same period.
The death toll was based on statistics compiled by Iraq’s ministries of interior, defence and health on the number of people killed and wounded in attacks in Iraq.
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