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Number of Displaced Iraqis Has Soared, Aid Group Says    [

    2007 Is Deadliest Year for US in Iraq
    By Lauren Frayer
    The Associated Press

    Tuesday 06 November 2007

5 US soldiers, 1 sailor killed, making 2007 deadliest year of Iraq War for US troops.

    Baghdad - The U.S. military on Tuesday announced the deaths of five more soldiers, making 2007 the deadliest year for U.S. troops despite a recent downturn, according to an Associated Press count.

    At least 852 American military personnel have died in Iraq so far this year the highest annual toll since the war began in March 2003, according to AP figures.

    The grim milestone passed despite a sharp drop in U.S. and Iraqi deaths here in recent months, after a 30,000-strong U.S. force buildup. There were 39 deaths in October, compared to 65 in September and 84 in August.

    Five U.S. soldiers were killed Monday in two separate roadside bomb attacks, said Rear Adm. Gregory Smith, director of the Multi-National Force-Iraq's communications division.

    "We lost five soldiers yesterday in two unfortunate incidents, both involving IEDs," Smith told reporters in Baghdad's heavily-guarded Green Zone.

    Some 850 troops died in 2004, mostly in larger, more conventional battles like the campaign to cleanse Fallujah of Sunni militants in November, and U.S. clashes with Shiite militiamen in the sect's holy city of Najaf in August.

    But the American military in Iraq reached its highest troop levels in Iraq this year 165,000. Moreover, the military's decision to send soldiers out of large bases and into Iraqi communities means more troops have seen more "contact with enemy forces" than ever before, said Maj. Winfield Danielson, a U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad.

    "It's due to the troop surge, which allowed us to go into areas that were previously safe havens for insurgents," Danielson told the AP on Sunday. "Having more soldiers, and having them out in the communities, certainly contributes to our casualties."

    Meanwhile, the U.S. said it planned to release nine Iranian prisoners in the coming days, including two captured when U.S. troops stormed an Iranian government office in Irbil last January. The office was shut after the raid, but it reopened as an Iranian consulate on Tuesday, Iraqi and Iranian officials said.

    A military spokesman said Iran appears to have kept its promise to stop the flow into Iraq of bomb-making materials and other weaponry that Washington says has inflamed insurgent violence and caused many American troop casualties.

    Defense Secretary Robert Gates said last week that Iran had made such assurances to the Iraqi government.

    "It's our best judgment that these particular EFPs ... in recent large cache finds do not appear to have arrived here in Iraq after those pledges were made," Rear Adm. Gregory Smith, director of the Multi-National Force-Iraq's communications division, told reporters Tuesday.

    Among the weapons Washington has accused Iran of supplying to Iraqi insurgents are EFPs, or explosively formed projectiles. They fire a slug of molten metal capable of penetrating even the most heavily armored military vehicles, and thus are more deadly than other roadside bombs.

    The No. 2 U.S. commander in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Ray Odierno, said last week that there had been a sharp decline in the number of EFPs found in Iraq in the last three months. At the time, he and Gates both said it was too early to tell whether the trend would hold, and whether it could be attributed to action by Iranian authorities. Iran publicly denies that it has sent weapons to Shiite militias in Iraq.

    Also Tuesday, the U.S. military said Iraqi troops had discovered 22 bodies in a mass grave northwest of Baghdad over the weekend. The bodies were found during a joint operation Saturday. It was the second mass grave found in the area in less than a month.

    After the discovery, U.S. and Iraqi forces launched an operation Sunday, including ground raids and air assaults targeting al-Qaida in the area, the U.S. statement said.

    About 30 suspects were detained, it said. Two car bomb facilities and a number of weapons caches also were found, it added.

    Iraqi officials were trying to identify the bodies and notify families.

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    Number of Displaced Iraqis Has Soared, Aid Group Says
    By Amit R. Paley
    The Washington Post

    Tuesday 06 November 2007

    Baghdad - The number of Iraqis fleeing their homes has more than quadrupled since the U.S. troop buildup began in February, leaving 2.3 million Iraqis displaced and further dividing the country along sectarian lines, according to a new report from the Iraqi Red Crescent Society.

    The figures, which measured the number of internally displaced people at the end of September, present a grim accounting of the humanitarian crisis unfolding as Shiite militias and Sunni insurgent groups drive civilians, usually from the opposite sect, out of their homes, neighborhoods and cities.

    More than 83 percent of those displaced were women and children, and most children were younger than 12, the report found. Most lived in Baghdad. Many lack adequate health services, cannot transfer their children to new schools and cannot find jobs.

    The number of internally displaced Iraqis at the end of September represented a 16 percent increase since the end of August, and was more than 40 times higher than March 2006, when sectarian fighting accelerated following the bombing of the Golden Mosque in Sammara, a Shiite shrine, according to the report.

    "This attack ignited sectarian and ethnic arms conflict throughout Iraq on a scale never seen before. Thousands of Shiites had fled Sunni areas and vice versa," the report said. "In addition to their plight as being displaced, the majority suffer from disease, poverty and malnutrition."

    The power struggle in Iraq has also pitted groups of the same sect against each other. On Monday south of Baghdad in Diwaniyah, for example, police forces tied to the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, one of the largest Shiite parties in the country, arrested 11 followers of the powerful Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, one of his spokesmen said.

    The spokesman, Abu Zainab al-Karawi, described the detentions as part of an "escalating campaign of arrests" by the local police against the Sadr movement.