Is two bombs a day the best Iraq can hope for?
| 10:01 UK time, Thursday, 30 December 2010
The report suggests deaths dropped by 15% from 2009, to just under 4,000.
On average, two bombs explode each day in the country, each killing four people. The reports says this is the "impassable minimum", with civilians likely to be killed at similar rates for years to come.
So is this the best Iraqis can hope for? Priyam on our Facebook page thinks not:
The tragedy of the situation is that even if 2 bombs explode everyday, it is taken for granted for places like Iraq and Afghanistan. Would we react the same way had it been some other country?
And is critical of the way the report is itself being reported:
bbcnews is so biased. Iraq body count shows fall in civilian deaths. Why not '10 civilians a day still being killed'? Never reported before
But there's equal criticism from on his blog, who describes criticism as "politically expedient memory loss" and says this number of deaths is nothing compared to those killed when Saddam Hussein was in charge:
That 108,000 over seven years equates to less than HALF the average number of killings committed in any one year by Hussein's regime & the 2010 figures are less than ons sixth of that.
What do you think? Are the figures something to applaud, or to be ashamed of?
