REUTERS
January 16, 2007
BAGHDAD, Jan 16 (Reuters) - The United
Nations said on Tuesday more than 34,000 Iraqi civilians were killed in
violence last year and it chided the government for allowing the killers,
some of them inside the security forces, to go unpunished.
Twin
blasts that killed 15 people near a mosque in central Baghdad were
reminder of the daily violence that claims hundreds of lives every week in
the capital.
The government is preparing to launch a security plan
backed by U.S. reinforcements and billed as a "last chance" for
Iraq.
Sectarian tensions have been inflamed by the botched
execution on this week of two of Saddam Hussein's close aides.
The
U.N. human rights chief in Baghdad, Gianni Magazzeni, told a news
conference that 34,452 civilians were killed and more than 36,000 wounded
in 2006.
Magazzeni accused the government of failing to provide
security and blamed some of the violence on militias colluding with or
working inside the police and army.
The figures are much higher
than any statistics issued by Iraqi government officials. The government
itself branded the United Nations' last two-monthly report in November
grossly exaggerated and banned its civil servants from releasing
data.
"During 2006, 34,452 civilians have been violently killed,"
Magazzeni said. "The focus of this report is actually on the need for the
government to increase its action with respect to the rule of
law.
"Law enforcement agencies do not provide effective protection
to the population of Iraq," he said, adding that "militias act in
collusion with or have infiltrated" the security forces.
According
to the latest U.N. report, based on data from hospitals compiled by the
Health Ministry and from the Baghdad morgue, 6,376 civilians were killed
in November and December.
Of 4,731 people killed in Baghdad in
November and December, most died of gunshot wounds, he said -- an
indication they were victims of death squad killings rather than the car
bombings that are also a feature of the Iraqi
capital.
DOUBLE BOMBING
A roadside bomb followed by
a blast from a motorcycle rigged with explosives killed 15 people and
wounded 70 near a Sunni mosque in central Baghdad on Tuesday, an interior
ministry source said.
A hospital source said at least 11 bodies and
many wounded had been brought to the hospital. U.S. forces helped the
wounded. A police source said it appeared the blasts were timed so that
the second would hit rescue services who came to help.
Prime
Minister Nuri al-Maliki, with the help of some 20,000 more U.S. troops
being deployed by President George W. Bush, is preparing a major crackdown
on sectarian killers in Baghdad -- including militias loyal to radical
cleric Moqtada al-Sadr and other fellow Shi'ite allies of
Maliki.
U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad said on Monday the plan
was a "defining moment" for Iraq. Senior Shi'ite politicians call it a
"last chance" to avert civil war and save a government that represents
Shi'ites' first real taste of power in Iraq for
centuries.
Sectarian tensions were fuelled again this week by the
executions on Monday of Saddam Hussein's half-brother and a former judge
convicted with him for crimes against humanity.
Mourners came on
Tuesday to pay their respects to the two who were buried near Saddam in
the Sunni Arab bastion of Awja, near Tikrit. Government efforts to avoid a
repeat of uproar over the ousted leader's rowdy execution were thwarted
when his half -brother's head was severed by the noose.
Many of the
government's Shi'ite Muslim supporters rejoiced at the death of Barzan
Ibrahim al-Tikriti, Saddam's once feared intelligence chief who was
accused of sending people to death in a meat grinder. But voices in Iraq's
Sunni Arab minority saw the decapitation as a deliberate sectarian act of
revenge.
U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon had pleaded for their
lives. "He regrets that, despite pleas from both himself and the High
Commissioner for Human Rights to spare the lives of the two co-defendants,
they were both executed," Ban's spokeswoman said.