Stonewalling

The government of Nouri al Maliki refuses to share martality statistics with the UN.

The United Nations is unable to determine how many Iraqi civilians have been killed so far this year because the Iraqi government won’t share the information, a U.N. agency said in a Wednesday report.

An Iraqi government official denied that the information was withheld to cover up the number of civilian deaths, and the prime minister’s office said the U.N. report “lacks accuracy.”

Even without the numbers, the report delivers a grim message: Iraq is facing “immense security challenges in the face of growing violence and armed opposition to its authority and the rapidly worsening humanitarian crisis.”

The report also contains a laundry list of human rights concerns.

[snip]

The quarterly human rights report written by the U.N. Assistance Mission for Iraq is considered the most reliable tally of civilians killed in Iraq, but Wednesday’s report did not include the numbers for January, February and March.

[snip]

In its Wednesday report, the U.N. says the Iraqi government provided no “substantive explanation or justification” for its decision to withhold information from the Ministry of Health and the Medico-Legal Institute, the capital’s main morgue.

2 thoughts on “Stonewalling

  1. I don’t understand: Shrub tells us that an increase in the number is a good sign that our strategy is working. The number is up. So why aren’t they releasing the good news?

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