How many Iraqis ousted?

April 30, 2006

BAGHDAD - A top Iraqi official said yesterday that sectarian violence has forced as many as 100,000 families across Iraq to flee their homes, although the U.S. military insists even lower estimates of displacement are exaggerated.

The violence continued, meanwhile, with 16 Iraqis killed - six of them tortured in captivity - and an American soldier killed by a roadside bomb in the capital, raising to 70 the number of U.S. service members who have died in Iraq this month, according to an Associated Press count.

Vice President Adil Abdul-Mahdi told reporters in the southern city of Najaf that 90 percent of displaced families were Shias like himself and the rest Sunnis, the minority that held sway under former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.

Other estimates of the number of displaced have been lower. Dr. Salah Abdul-Razzaq, spokesman of the Shia Endowment, a government body that runs Shia religious institutions, put the number of displaced families at 13,750 nationwide, or about 90,000 people. That includes 25,000 Iraqis who have fled their homes since an attack on a Shia mosque in Samarra on Feb. 22 triggered a wave of sectarian attacks on Sunni mosques and clerics.

Earlier this week, U.S. spokesman Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch told reporters that U.S. forces had found no "widespread movement" of Shias and Sunnis away from religiously mixed areas, despite reports to the contrary by Iraqi officials.

In yesterday's worst violence, the bodies of six handcuffed, blindfolded and tortured men were found in the Baghdad neighborhood of Dora, said police Capt. Jamil Hussein. The area has seen frequent sectarian violence. Also, gunmen kidnapped a Sunni policeman and his brother from their home in the Sunni-dominated town of Jurf al-Sakhar and shot them to death, said police Capt. Muthana Khalidin. Eight other Iraqis were killed in scattered violence throughout the country.

The Los Angeles Times reported this week that a new poll conducted by a conservative American think tank indicated a majority of Iraqis say their country is in dismal economic shape and getting worse, with three in four respondents also describing security in the country as "poor."

The poll numbers reveal a population with little optimism about its economic future, the Times said. Iraqis believe jobs are harder to find, electrical service is poorer and corruption has increased dramatically since last year, according to the poll, which involved 2,804 face-to-face interviews from across the country by the Washington-based International Republican Institute. The March 23-31 interviews were conducted during a time of surging sectarian violence following the bombing in Samarra. Iraqi pollsters conducted the interviews and included responses from violence-ridden western Al Anbar province for the first time since the IRI began regular opinion surveys in May 2004.

Of the respondents, 62 percent said Iraq is more politically divided today than in the past.