Injuries to U.S. troops in Iraq soaring

WASHINGTON — The number of U.S troops wounded in Iraq has surged to its highest level in nearly two years as Americans fight block-by-block in Baghdad to try to check a spiral of sectarian violence that U.S. commanders warn could lead to civil war.

Last month, 776 U.S. troops were wounded in Iraq, the highest number since the effort to retake the insurgent-held city of Fallujah in November 2004, according to Defense Department data. It was the fourth-highest monthly total since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

The sharp increase in American wounded — with nearly 300 more in the first week of October — is a grim measure of the degree to which the U.S. military has been thrust into the lead of the effort to stave off civil war in Iraq, military officials and experts say. Beyond Baghdad, Marines battling Sunni insurgents in Iraq's Anbar province last month also suffered their highest number of wounded in action since late 2004.

More than 20,000 U.S. troops have been wounded and 2,700 killed in the Iraq war. While much reporting has focused on the number of dead, military experts say the number of wounded is a more accurate gauge of the fierceness of fighting because advances in armor and medical care allow the survival of many service members who would have perished in past wars. The ratio of wounded to killed among U.S. forces in Iraq is about 8 to 1, compared with 3 to 1 in Vietnam.

"These days, wounded are a much better measure of the intensity of the operations than killed," said Anthony Cordesman, a military expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

The surge in wounded comes as U.S. commanders issue increasingly dire warnings about the threat of civil war in Iraq, all but ruling out cuts in the current contingent of more than 140,000 U.S. troops before spring.

Last month, Gen. John Abizaid, the top commander in the Middle East, said "sectarian tensions, if left unchecked, could be fatal to Iraq," making it imperative that the U.S. military focus its "main effort" on Baghdad.

Thousands of U.S. troops have been ordered to the city since July to reinforce Iraqi soldiers and police who failed to halt — or in some cases were complicit in — hundreds of killings of Iraqi civilians by Sunni and Shiite groups.

U.S. commanders have appealed for weeks for 3,000 more Iraqi army troops to help secure Baghdad, but had received only a few hundred as of Thursday, according to military officials. Mistrust of Iraqi police in Baghdad remains high, Abizaid said.

An Iraqi police brigade with hundreds of officers suspected of involvement in sectarian killings was removed from duty last week.

"The Baghdad security plan and the general spiral of operations is driving us to be more active than we have been in recent months," said Michael O'Hanlon, a military analyst at the Brookings Institution, a Washington-based think tank. "We have more people on patrols and out of base, so we get more people hurt and killed in firefights."

In March, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Iraqi forces — not U.S. troops — would deal with a civil war "to the extent one were to occur." Today's operations in Baghdad show that goal was not realistic, experts say.

"In a sense," O'Hanlon said, "the Baghdad security plan is a complete repudiation of the earlier Rumsfeld doctrine where he said the Iraqis would prevent the civil war."

Despite the mounting cost in U.S. wounded and dead — including 13 American soldiers killed in combat in Baghdad in three days last week — Pentagon officials say aggressive military operations in the Iraqi capital are at best a short-term and partial solution, buying time for political compromise.

"The Baghdad security plan will only be a temporary fix. You need to address the root causes," said a Pentagon official who has served in Iraq and spoke on the condition of anonymity.

The rising toll of wounded reflects ongoing heavy combat in Anbar as well as in Baghdad, where U.S. troops face an escalation of small-arms and other attacks as they push into the city's most violent neighborhoods to rein in sectarian death squads, militias and insurgents, officers say.

"Attacks against the coalition have definitely increased as ... the enemy is trying to come in and re-establish themselves" in a dozen religiously divided districts in east and west Baghdad, said Lt. Col. Jonathan Withington, a spokesman for the U.S. military command in the city.

Withington said he was not authorized to release the number of U.S. military personnel wounded in Baghdad or the number of attacks in the city, although the military has released such data in the past.

A survey of reports on combat deaths from August through early October, however, shows an increase in those killed in Baghdad from small-arms fire as well as bombs along roads.

"September was horrific," and October could be "the worst month of the war," said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a Virginia-based, defense-oriented Web site.