WASHINGTON, Jan 8: More than 17,000 Iraqi civilians and police officers died violently in the second half of 2006 in what constitutes a sharp increase from the beginning of the year, The Washington Post reported on Monday.Citing confidential Iraqi health ministry statistics, the newspaper said that in the first six months of last year, 5,640 Iraqi civilians and police officers were killed.

But that number more than tripled to 17,310 in the latter half of the year, the report said.

An official of the ministry said the numbers remained incomplete, suggesting the final tally could be higher.

The spike in casualties occurred despite a United States military operation in Baghdad dubbed ‘Together forward’, which involved thousands of US and Iraqi troops cordoning off some of the deadliest neighbourhoods and conducting house-to-house searches, the paper said.—AFP