"The US military surge in Iraq, designed to turn around the course of the war, appears to be failing as senior US officers admit they need yet more troops and new figures show a sharp increase in the victims of death squads in Baghdad", the May 13 London Observer reported.
"In the first 11 days of this month, there have already been 234 bodies — men murdered by death squads — dumped around the capital, a dramatic rise from the 137 found in the same period of April", the paper reported.
While the US military, parroted by most of the Western corporate media, claims that the death squads are operated by "Shiite militias" and "Sunni insurgents", they are an integral component of Washington's counterinsurgency war in Iraq.
In September 2005, a UN human rights report stated that the special police commando units — controlled by the Iraqi interior ministry, which is led by Washington's Iraqi allies — were responsible for an organised campaign of detentions, torture and killings of thousands of suspected supporters of the Sunni-based anti-occupation insurgency. It reported that these units had been recruited and trained by US Special Forces personnel.
The surge in the number of death-squad victims over the last month, the Observer reported, "emerged as the commander of US forces in northern Iraq, Major-General Benjamin Mixon, admitted he did not have enough soldiers to contain the escalating violence in Diyala province, which neighbours Baghdad and has become the focus of the heaviest fighting between largely Sunni insurgent groups and the US Army, which has seen casualties increase by 300%".
By next month, all of the extra 28,000 US troops that the Pentagon has committed to its "surge" strategy will have been deployed in Iraq, bringing the total US occupation force up to 160,000 soldiers.
Under the "surge" plan, most of the extra US troops are being deployed to Baghdad. However, on May 14, Voice of America reported that a US military spokesperson in Baghdad said that 3000 extra US troops would be deployed to Diyala.
That same day, six US soldiers were killed in Iraq, taking total US troop fatalities since the March 2003 invasion to 3401. During the first 15 days of May, at least 50 US soldiers died in Iraq, an average rate of 3.33 per day — almost the same rate as in April, when 104 US soldiers were killed.
US troop deaths have risen each month since the "surge" strategy and its accompanying US offensive against Iraqi resistance groups in Baghdad began on February 14.
A key part of the US offensive in the Iraqi capital is the construction of 3.8-metre high concrete walls around up to 10 of the city's largely Sunni neighbourhoods. Associated Press reported on May 12 that, by a vote of 138-to-88, the 275-member Iraqi parliament passed a resolution opposing these walls.
"Construction of the walls — particularly in the Baghdad neighborhood of Azamiyah — has been criticized by residents and Sunni clerics who say it is a form of sectarian discrimination", AP added. According to a survey conducted by the neighbourhood's local government on April 22, 90% of respondents were strongly opposed to the wall.
Once the wall is completed, the April 23 Washington Post reported, "troops armed with biometric scanning devices will compile a neighborhood census by recording residents' fingerprints and eye patterns and will perhaps issue them special badges".
The May 13 Baghdad Azzaman daily reported that "residents of Adhamiyah have vowed to destroy the walls US troops are constructing to separate Baghdad neighbourhoods on sectarian grounds".
Azzaman also reported that "the inhabitants of Kadhimiyah, a Shiite-dominated neighbourhood have joined forces with the Sunni majority in Adhamiyah to have the walls pulled down. The two neighbourhoods are working to demonstrate that the two sects can tolerate each other and live peacefully together."
On March 15, the US Congress's Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report, based on previously classified Pentagon data, showing that as the number of additional US troops began arriving in Iraq in March and April, Iraqi resistance attacks declined only marginally.
The GAO reported stated: "Enemy-initiated attacks against the coalition and its Iraqi partners continued to increase through October 2006 and remain high. The average total number of attacks per day has risen from 71 per day in January 2006 to a record high of 176 per day in October 2006. For the last 3 months, average attacks per day were 164 in February, 157 in March, and 149 in April 2007."
This decline "is too small to be meaningful", John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a research group that closely follows the Iraq war, told the March 16 New York Times.
In April, 90% of "enemy" attacks were directed against the US-led occupation troops and their puppet Iraqi security forces, according to the GAO.
The report also noted that despite by the end of 2006 US$3.8 billion of past Iraqi oil revenues having been allocated to US contractors for reconstruction work on the country's oil and electricity sectors, output of both is declining.
Prior to the US-led invasion in March 2003, Iraq produced 2.5 million barrels per day of crude oil (down from 3.5 mbpd before UN sanctions were imposed in 1990). Average output in 2006 was 2.1 mbpd, falling to 1.9 mbpd in the first two months of this year.
According to US State Department estimates, before the invasion Baghdad's 6 million residents received electricity for an average of 16-24 hours per day; nationwide, Iraqi homes received 4-12 per day. The GAO report states that in 2006, "hours of power per day nationwide averaged 11 and only 5.9 in Baghdad", with these figures falling to 8.6 and 5.1 respectively during the first two months of 2007.