September 25, 2009 - As sectarian violence drove the number of civilian deaths in Iraq to thousands per month in 2006 and 2007, many Iraqi ministries, morgues and hospitals were under government order not to release the embarrassing figures, and the prime minister's office generally disputed the ones that did leak out.

American forces in Iraq were no more helpful, often refusing to release figures or claiming that they did not exist. Obtaining information on the deaths was an exhausting, grisly and often clandestine affair, and - Iraq being Iraq - no two sets of figures ever seemed to match exactly.

But now that the estimated deaths are down to hundreds per month or even fewer, the figures are beginning to appear, as if by magic, in United States government reports complete with easy-to-read charts and careful footnotes. The the sources identified in the footnotes, however, still don't precisely match.

The latest report, dated Sept. 17, is by the Congressional Research Service. A copy of the report was posted online by Secrecy News, a publication of the Federation of American Scientists.

The data in the report show that the Pentagon has been tracking deaths of Iraqi civilians and security forces since at least January 2006, a month before the bombing of a mosque sacred to Shiites helped ignite the violence. But in a legacy of the old secrecy, the research service had to estimate some of the data from printed Pentagon charts because the exact figures are still classified.

According to the Pentagon figures, Iraqi civilian deaths skyrocketed from about 500 a month in January 2006 to about 3,700 the following January. At that point, the total began dropping in fits and starts, reaching about 2,000 in the late summer and fall of 2007 and roughly 600 in January 2008.

By the following summer, the number of civilian deaths had reached a lengthy plateau at around 500 a month, although there were occasional dips to lower numbers. Those trends are all mirrored in Pentagon charts that record deaths of Iraqi security forces.

Because of its political implications, the scale of civilian deaths in Iraq has been the subject of intense disagreement, with some groups claiming that the Pentagon and Iraqi ministry figures are far too low. The paper by the research service does not adjudicate among the various figures, warning
only that "readers should exercise caution when using them and should look to them as guideposts rather than as statements of fact."

Read the Full Report Here.

The New York Times