Iraq crackdown failing to bring results

Iraqi officials said on Thursday that nearly 2,000 civilians had died in January, a new monthly high that suggests that a crackdown by the government of prime minister Nouri al-Maliki against militias has failed to yield any immediate results.

An interior ministry spokesman was quoted by Reuters as saying that 1,971 people had been killed by “terrorism” in January, compared to 1,930 in December. The spokesman could not be reached independently for comment.

It was not clear whether this definition would include the hundreds reported killed Iraqi security forces backed with US airpower in a clash with a millenarian cult near Najaf over the weekend. That incident, one of the bloodiest battles in Iraq since late 2004, would significantly inflate any death toll for January.

Numbers coming out of Iraqi government sources are always open to question. Most observers consider the official death toll to be incomplete, but it is also possible that some agencies in Mr Maliki’s divided Shia-lead government have a political motive to inflate figures.

Nonetheless, the figures dampen hopes that a crackdown on Shia militias like the Mahdi Army, nominally loyal to radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr and held responsible for a large share of Iraq’s sectarian bloodshed, had significantly reduced the scale of violence.

Residents of Shia areas say that the Mahdi Army has largely disappeared from the streets since the middle of the month, for fear that US or Iraqi troops will arrest their leaders. A new wave of US troops has meanwhile deployed into forward bases in Sunni areas where the militias have been active.

Some Sunni Arab leaders who have accused the militias of targeting their constituency have said that militia attacks have fallen, although they caution that key militia leaders have not been caught.

Meanwhile, the daily violence in the capital continues. Yesterday, six people were killed by a suicide bomb attack in the predominantly Shia district of Kerrada. Another three people were killed by a car bomb and one more by a mortar barrage in a largely Sunni neighbourhood.