Friday, February 10, 2006

Attacks by Insurgents in Iraq Increase



From the NYT via Common Dreams:

Sweeping statistics on insurgent violence in Iraq that were declassified for a Senate hearing on Wednesday appear to portray a rebellion whose ability to mount attacks has steadily grown in the nearly three years since the invasion.

...


The curve traced out by the figures between June 2003 and December 2005 shows a number of fluctuations, including several large spikes in insurgent activity — one as recently as October of last year. But while American and Iraqi officials have often pointed to the downward edges of those fluctuations as evidence that the steam was going out of the insurgency, the numbers over all seem to tell a different story, Mr. [Joseph A.]Christoff [director of international affairs and trade at the Government Accountability Office] said. "It's not going down," he said. "There are peaks and valleys, but if you look at every peak, it's higher than the peak before."

Officials have recently noted that the numbers of attacks in the final two months of last year dropped after an October peak, which occurred around both Ramadan and a referendum on Iraq's constitution. But Mr. Christoff's chart shows that the number of attacks in December, nearly 2,500, was almost 250 percent of the number in March 2004.

But the trend line began even before March 2004, when the number of attacks was already nearly double what it had been in July or August 2003. Mr. Christoff's paper cites a senior United States military officer saying that "attack levels ebb and flow as the various insurgent groups — almost all of which are an intrinsic part of Iraq's population — re-arm and attack again."

Attacks against Iraqi security forces have grown faster than the overall count; by December 2005 they had grown more than 200 percent since March 2004. Of course, as more Iraqis are trained and put into the field, more of them are targets.

The paper, citing a contracting office in Iraq, said that as attacks had fluctuated downward in the final two months of last year, attacks on convoys related to rebuilding efforts had risen. Twenty convoys had been attacked, with 11 casualties, in October 2005, while 33 convoys had been attacked, with 34 casualties, in January 2006, the paper says.

2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

"There are peaks and valleys, but if you look at every peak, it's higher than the peak before."

Bahahaha, ever heard of linear regression?

Maybe someone that knows something about statistics can take the guess-work out of this.... :rolleyes:

February 10, 2006 11:49 pm  
Blogger Unknown said...

Not sure what you're on about, anon. Here is an applet that you can play with that shows you that - provided the valleys are not to deep, increasing peaks will give a function with a positive slope. If your point is that some point in the future the attacks will regress to zero, that's pretty lame. It completely ignores what is happing in the real world now.


On turning the corner:

"2005 was really a turning point, in the sense the progress we made...[W]e’ve now got a large number of Iraqis taking the lead various places around the country from a security and military standpoint."
-- Vice President Cheney, 2/7/06

VERSUS

"[Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Peter] Pace said only one Iraqi army battalion is capable of fighting without U.S. help. That is the same number as in September, when U.S. commanders disclosed that the number of such highly trained battalions had dropped from three to one."
-- Associated Press, 2/7/06

February 11, 2006 1:22 am  

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