The death toll for US troops in Iraq in September — 66 — was the lowest monthly total since August last year when 65 US troops were killed. However, by the end of last month, a total of 804 US soldiers had died this year in Iraq — 301 more than in the first nine months of 2006.
US officials attributed the decline in monthly US combat deaths since May (when 126 US troops died in Iraq) to the "surge" strategy that has boosted the size in the US occupation force from 134,000 troops in January to 169,000 troops in September.
A key part of the "surge" strategy has been a "security plan" for Baghdad centred on dividing the city of six million inhabitants into a series of walled ghettos.
The September 9 British Independent described Baghdad as a "city divided by high concrete walls, barbed wire and checkpoints; armoured columns moving through deserted evening streets lit by the glow of searchlights and emptied by official curfew and fear ... for many Iraqis, the Americans have turned their land into a prison.
"The walls, being put up by American contractors at a record speed, are formalising the break up of Baghdad. The city where Sunni, Shia and Christians once lived in comparative social amity — although not the same access to political power — is now so divided along sectarian lines that it may be impossible ever to reunify it."
Agence France-Presse reported on September 17 that the "US military this month erected a wall hundreds of metres long and five metres high between the predominantly Shiite Shuala neighbourhood and the majority Sunni Ghazaliyah district".
"We are one people. This is not Israel and Palestine that we need to have such walls", Hashim, a Shiite from Ghazaliyah, complained to AFP as he made the lengthy detour around the wall and across a stagnant canal to reach Shuala, where he works as a primary school teacher.
"In the more than four years that the US military has been in Iraq", the AFP report continued, "hundreds of similar concrete walls have been erected in neighbourhoods around the capital, some of them cutting across major thoroughfares ...
"Many Iraqis argue that the barricades, which US commanders term 'concrete caterpillars', only serve to heighten tensions between Sunnis and Shiites by segregating the once mixed city."
AFP reported that the residents of Shuala have dubbed the US-constructed separation barrier around their neighbourhood the "wall of hatred". They have hung banners over it reading "The wall is US terrorism" and "No, no to the dividing wall".
Residents from both sides of the wall held a protest march on September 12, during which they shouted anti-US slogans and demanded that the wall be torn down.
On October 1, the Iraqi government reported that Iraqi civilian deaths from war-related violence had dropped by 50% in September. A tally provided by Iraq's health, interior and defence ministries quoted by news agencies noted 884 civilians killed in September, down from 1773 in August, 1653 in July and 1227 in June.
The government figures reported that 78 Iraqi soldiers and police were killed in September, down slightly from 87 in August. The figures also reported that 366 suspected "anti-government militants" were killed last month, 106 less than in August.
That same day, Reuters reported: "Residents of Iraq's southern city of Basra have begun strolling riverfront streets again after four years of fear, their city much quieter since British troops withdrew from the grand Saddam Hussein-era Basra Palace. Political assassinations and sectarian violence continue, some city officials say, but on a much smaller scale than at any time since British troops moved into the city after the 2003 US-led invasion."
The final contingent of 500 British troops in Basra, Iraq's second latest city, who were occupying the palace, pulled out of city on September 3. "The situation these days is better", housewife Khairiya Salman, who lives near the palace, told Reuters. "We were living in hell ... the area is calm since their withdrawal."
Most of the 5500 British troops in southern Iraq are now based at a huge camp 16 kilometres outside the city near Basra airport, subject to daily mortar and Katyusha rocket attacks.
On October 3, British PM Gordon Brown announced that the British troop contingent in Iraq would be reduced to 4500 by the end of the year, amid media speculation that he will call a general election for November.
In August, US officials accused the British forces of having accepting "defeat" in Basra at the hands of anti-occupation militias in the predominantly Shiite city. The September 9 London Sunday Times however reported that "Senior American defence officials have ordered a halt to transatlantic bickering over the British withdrawal from Basra.
"According to sources in Washington, a 'very senior defence figure' told the joint chiefs of staff, the heads of America's armed forces, that the 'sniping against Britain must cease'. He reminded them that not only was Britain one of the few allies on which the United States had been able to depend throughout the six years since the September 11 attacks, but it was the only one with war-fighting capability."