:mad:
IRAQ IN TRANSITION
Click Here
Bombs bad enough, but guns worse in Baghdad
Death toll from shootings soars in capital's streets
By Liz Sly
Tribune foreign correspondent
Published August 11, 2005
BAGHDAD -- July was a record month at Baghdad's main morgue, where the bodies pile up so fast they often have to be buried before they can be identified to make way for the next day's arrivals.
A total of 1,100 corpses were received in July, a sharp increase from the previous record of 879 in June, and far exceeding the morgue's 10-a-day capacity, according to its overworked director, Faed Bakr.
The figures exclude casualties from bombings, which are not taken for autopsy because the cause of death already is known. While car bombings and suicide attacks have garnered the most attention and have claimed thousands of lives in Iraq, shootings have accounted for thousands more civilian deaths since the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime.
At the morgue last month, more than 60 percent of the deaths--676, or more than 20 a day--came from shootings, in yet another indicator that overall violence in the world's most violent capital keeps getting worse, even as the U.S. military and the Iraqi government
insist that the insurgency is being tamed.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0508110202aug11,1,544916.story?coll=chi-newsnationworld-hed