Baghdad, Iraq – Hostile fire has killed more U.S. soldiers and Marines in Iraq in May than during each of the three previous months.
If the trend continues, May will be one of the deadliest months for U.S. troops during the past year.
So far, insurgents have killed 54 American troops in May, including 14 in the past three days. With a week left, the month is likely to eclipse all but two others – November and September 2004 – for deaths by hostile fire since June 2004, based on figures tabulated by Iraq Coalition Casualty Count, a group that tracks troop deaths from Department of Defense news releases.
The casualty figures appear to end a trend that started soon after national elections in January, when insurgents seemed to shift from targeting U.S. forces to attacking the nascent Iraqi army and police.
With sectarian violence increasing between the nation’s Shiite and Sunni Muslims, the figures raise the question of whether Iraq is turning into two battlefields: one of insurgents versus the U.S. military and another of Iraqi sects fighting each other.
Since the nation’s interim government took office on April 28, more than 590 Iraqis have been killed in attacks, most of them civilians.
“There is going to be a wave of violence (targeting U.S. forces) as long as there is occupation,” said Amer Hassan Fayadh, a Baghdad University political-science professor. At the same time, “when the regime fell, the Iraq state collapsed, too. The replacements for the police were (sectarian) militias.”
Those militias, and the groups behind them, have become entangled in a tit-for-tat killing of religious and political leaders as the minority Sunni population, which didn’t vote in large numbers during national elections, struggles to find its footing in a nation increasingly dominated by the majority Shiite sect.
With May’s figures, though, it’s clear that insurgents continue to target U.S. troops, even while fighting rages among Iraqis.
In the months after the elections, the number of insurgent attacks per day plummeted, averaging between the low 30s and mid-40s.
They spiked back up this month, hitting an average of about 70 a day before starting to dip during the past couple of days.
A Marine offensive this month in Iraq’s restive Anbar province contributed to the U.S. death count.
