Expect this year’s death toll to be even higher with ISIS growing stronger by the day.
Via Fox News:
Violence in Iraq soared in 2013 to levels not seen in years, U.N. officials reported this week, stoking concerns that the country is descending into the kind of sectarian bloodshed that gripped the country before the U.S. troop surge.
The United Nations said 7,818 civilians were killed in 2013, a return to 2008 levels. The startling figure follows warnings from lawmakers and analysts that the violence threatens to undo hard-fought gains by the United States.
“The level of indiscriminate violence in Iraq is unacceptable,” U.N. Special Representative Nickolay Mladenov said in a statement, calling on the Iraqi government to curb “this infernal circle.”
U.S. troops withdrew from Iraq at the end of 2011. In the years immediately before and after that withdrawal, the level of violence remained relatively steady — and by Iraq standards, relatively low. The troop surge and other factors were credited with curbing the bloodshed from its 2004-2007 highs.
But the 2013 death toll is roughly double what it had been in recent years.
A number of factors are at play, and some are urging the Obama administration to get more involved — though there is little appetite to send U.S. troops back into the country.
The violence in Iraq began to surge in April, after the Shiite-led government staged a deadly crackdown on a Sunni protest camp.
Iraq’s Al Qaeda branch has fed on Sunni discontent and on the civil war in neighboring Syria, in which mostly Sunni rebels fight a government whose base is a Shiite offshoot sect. It has targeted civilians, particularly in Shiite areas of Baghdad, with waves of coordinated car bombings and other deadly attacks.
HT: ROP