WASHINGTON, Feb. 24 (UPI) -- Tracking trends in the Iraq conflict on a regular basis is seldom cheering: At best, the news tends to be complex and mixed. At worst, it turns out to involve assessing a week like this one.
The destruction of the dome of the Golden Mosque in Samara, one of the holiest sites in Shiite Islam, Wednesday set off precisely the kind of retaliatory bloody clashes between Iraq's 60 percent Shiite majority and its 20 percent Sunni minority among whom the insurgency, that U.S. military leaders have sought so hard to avert for so long, is rooted.
And as if that were not bad enough, Wednesday was another dark day, one of the worst in recent memory, in terms of casualties inflicted on U.S. forces serving in Iraq.
Seven soldiers, four from the 1st Brigade Combat Team of the 101st Airborne Division and three others from the 3rd Heavy Brigade Combat Team of the 4th Infantry Division, were killed in two roadside bomb attacks by improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, near Haijah, about 50 miles north of Baghdad, and in Balad, about 15 miles from the first attack.
This followed several weeks when, according to our assessments -- and also those of eminent U.S. military analysts -- the war had been mired in a form of stalemate, neither resolving dramatically to the benefit of U.S., Coalition and allied Iraqi security forces, nor metastasizing to the benefit of the Sunni insurgents.
Indeed, William S. Lind of the Free Congress Foundation, one of the most acute military analysts in the United States, in an analysis published by United Press International predicted earlier this month that the insurgents would likely seek to break this stalemate by bringing the war to an entirely new level. The attack on the Samarra mosque and the reactions it has provoked appear to reflect precisely that kind of initiative.
The total number of U.S. troops killed in Iraq through Friday, Feb. 10 since the start of U.S. operations to topple Saddam Hussein on March 19, 2003, was 2,290, according to official figures issued by the Department of Defense, a rise of only 20 in 13 days, or an average of just over 1.5 killed per day.
This rate was an improvement over the rate of 3.1 killed per day during the previous seven-day period, when 22 troops were killed. But the figures are misleading in two ways.
First, the figures for the 11 days from Feb. 11 through Feb. 21 were even better than that: Only 13 U.S. troops were killed in that time period, or an average of less than 1.2 killed per day. But the toll of seven troops killed in a single day in only two attacks Wednesday this week pushed the figures higher again.
The relative lull during that intervening week and a half supported the assessment we published last week by Anthony H. Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, one of the most respected and influential military experts in the U.S. capital, that the insurgents had been diverting resources and switching the main emphasis of their attacks to Iraqi forces over the past year, leading to somewhat of a reduction in the rate of casualties inflicted on U.S. forces.
Things would have to get a lot worse for the U.S. casualty rates to fall back to the levels of 33 soldiers killed in only seven days from Jan. 11 through Jan. 17, an average of 4.7 soldiers killed per day, or the figure of 28 in the Jan. 4-10 period when the average death rate was four U.S. soldiers killed per day.
The rate at which U.S. soldiers were being injured during that same 13 day period reflected the same trend, and it continued the positive trend we had tracked in previous weeks too: in the 13 days from Feb. 11 through Feb. 23, 89 U.S. troops were injured in Iraq, according to the DOD figures, at an average rate of just under 6.85 per day.
This marked a slight improvement in the previously existing trend, as in the seven days from Feb. 4 through Feb. 10, 47 U.S. soldiers were injured, according to the DOD figures, an average rate of just below seven per day. And even this was a more than 50 percent improvement on the previous five-day period from Monday, Jan. 30 through Friday, Feb. 3 when 58 U.S. soldiers were injured, according to the DOD figures, at an average rate of 11.6 per day.
The most recent 13 day period was also a marked improvement on the rate of 7.4 U.S. soldiers injured per day during the Jan. 11-17 period. This supported the assessments of Cordesman and Lind that the insurgency was continuing at a stable level, neither metastasizing to a new level, nor being significantly reduced by U.S. military operations or political initiatives.
The number of U.S. troops wounded in action from the beginning of hostilities on March 19, 2003, through Feb. 23, was 16,742, according to the Department of Defense figures.
Some 7,735 of those troops were wounded so seriously that they were listed as "WIA Not RTD" in the DOD figures. In other words: Wounded in Action Not Returned to Duty, an increase of 29 such casualties in 13 days, or just under 2.25 per day. This too was a marked improvement on the average rate of just under 3.3 Wounded in Action and Not Returned to Duty during the previous seven-day period. And it was more than twice as good as the rate of such categories of injury during the five day period before that, when 24 U.S. troops were wounded seriously enough that they were not returned to duty, at an average rate of 4.8 per day.
In all, an estimated 2,000 of the U.S. soldiers wounded in Iraq, or one in eight of them, have suffered brain damage, loss of limbs or been crippled for life by their injuries.
