In its last report, the U.N. said 3,709 Iraqi civilians were killed in October alone and that citizens were fleeing the country at a pace of 100,000 each month. The organization estimated at least 1.6 million Iraqis had left since the war began in March 2003.

At the time of the last U.N. report, Iraqi government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh called it "inaccurate and exaggerated" because it was not based on official government reports.

The U.N. report said Iraq's heavily armed Shiite militias were gaining strength and influence and that torture was rampant, despite the Iraqi government's vow to reduce human rights abuses.

"Hundreds of bodies continued to appear in different areas of Baghdad - handcuffed, blindfolded and bearing signs of torture and execution-style killing," the last UNAMI report said. "Many witnesses reported that perpetrators wear militia attire and even police or army uniforms."

The two primary militias in Iraq are the military wings of the country's strongest Shiite political groups, on which Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is heavily dependent. Al-Maliki has repeatedly rejected US demands that he disband the heavily armed groups, especially the Mahdi Army of radical anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.

"I think the type of violence is different in the past few months," Gianni Magazzeni, the UNAMI chief in Baghdad, said when the last report was issued in late November. "There was a great increase in sectarian violence in activities by terrorists and insurgents, but also by militias and criminal gangs."

He noted that religious clashes have been common since Sunni Arab insurgents bombed a major Shiite shrine on Feb. 22 in Samarra, north of Baghdad.

UNAMI's Human Rights Office continued to receive reports that Iraqi police and security forces have either been infiltrated by or act in collusion with militias, the report said.

It said that while sectarian violence is the main cause of the civilian killings, Iraqis also continue to be the victims of terrorist acts, roadside bombs and drive-by shootings. Others have been caught in the crossfire between rival gangs.

In its September 2006 issue, The Lancet, an independent and authoritative journal, published a study on mortality rates in Iraq.

The study estimated that 654,965 excess Iraqi deaths, including 601,027 from violence, had occurred in Iraq since the invasion of the country in March 2003.

The "confidence range" for the number of excess Iraqi deaths because of violence has been estimated at between 426,369 and 793,663, with 601,027 as the median number.

The US government and Iraq as well as others, including the Iraq Body Count, an organization that has conducted other types of surveys, denied the validity of the study's findings.

The Iraqi Minister of Health, in a statement made in Vienna in early November, indicated that as many as 150,000 Iraqi civilians might have been violently killed since 2003. But there are no known statistics for the early months of the US-led invasion.

1

2