In the face of a general strike called by Shiite militants in Baghdads northeastern Sadr City district, home to 2.5 million people, US troops ended their week-long siege of the district on October 31.
Iraq
On October 16, the UN Office of Humanitarian Assistances IRIN news service reported that electricity and clean water are now luxuries for most Iraqis. For example, Baghdad, a city with 6 million residents, gets no more than four to six hours of electricity a day.
On October 11, a team of Iraqi physicians, whose work was overseen by US epidemiologists at the Johns Hopkins Universitys Bloomberg School of Public Health, published a study in The Lancet, a prestigious British medical journal, estimating that the US-led occupation of Iraq has cost the lives of 655,000 Iraqis.
A strong majority of Iraqis want US-led military forces to immediately withdraw from the country, saying their swift departure would make Iraq more secure and decrease sectarian violence, according to new polls by the State Department and independent researchers, the September 27 Washington Post reported.
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