BAGHDAD, Sept 8: More than 1,500 people were killed in Baghdad last month, down by only 14 per cent from July, the health ministry said on Friday, despite US claims that a security operation had cut murders by half.

“The Baghdad morgue received 1,584 bodies of people killed in violent attacks,” Hakim al-Zamily, director general at the ministry told AFP. The ministry reported 1,850 killings in the war-torn capital in July.

The health ministry figures fly in the face of Thursday’s statement by the US-led forces chief spokesman Major General William Caldwell that August’s ‘murder rate in Baghdad dropped 52 per cent from the daily rate for July’.

However, another spokesman said on Friday that the US military figure for murders does not include those killed in Baghdad’s daily suicide bombings and mortar attacks in crowded civilian areas.

“Murders are basically sectarian, when an individual is targeted in a sectarian related death such as an execution, but do not include such things as car bombs or mortar attacks,” Lieutenant Colonel Barry Johnson told AFP.

This distinction, which had not been made clear earlier, could explain the discrepancy between the health ministry’s figures and those of the coalition.

Almost every day, Iraqis trade salvos of mortar shells between Baghdad neighbourhoods and trigger car bombs and booby traps in civilian areas as part of a vicious sectarian turf war between rival Sunni and Shiite factions.

At the same time, political assassinations and sectarian reprisals are carried out by shadowy death squads, who snatch their victims from their homes or the street, torture them to death and dump their bodies by the roadside.—AFP