UN: July deadliest month in Iraq since 2008
A total of 1,057 Iraqis killed and 2,326 wounded in violence whose impact on civilians “remains disturbingly high”.
The UN has released the latest casualty figures and expressed concern about the high number of dead and wounded who were killed in the month of July.
According to United Nations Mission in Iraq (UNAMI), 1,057 Iraqis were killed and another 2,326 were wounded in July 2013.
The number of civilians, including civilian police, killed was 928, while the injured was 2,109. A further 129 members of the Iraqi Security Forces were killed and 217 were injured.
“The impact of violence on civilians remains disturbingly high, with at least 4,137 civilians killed and 9,865 injured since the beginning of 2013,” Gyorgy Busztin, the acting special representative of the UN secretary-general for Iraq, said on Thursday.
“We haven’t seen such numbers in more than five years, when the blind rage of sectarian strife that inflicted such deep wounds upon this country was finally abating. I reiterate my urgent call on Iraq’s political leaders to take immediate and decisive action to stop the senseless bloodshed, and to prevent these dark days from returning.”
Baghdad was the worst-affected governorate in July with 957 civilian casualties [238 killed and 719 injured], followed by Salahuddin, Ninewa, Diyala, Kirkuk, Anbar, Babil, Wasit and Basra.
The death toll for the month of July last year, according to figures released by the ministries of defence, interior and health in Iraq amounted to 989 people, the highest official death toll from the violence in a single month since April 2008, were injured in 1567, most of them civilians.