Coalition Fatality Trends

To be honest, the 2000 mark is not exactly that important a statistic to me. I am more interested in looking at the month-by-month fatality rate, to see if things are getting better or worse. Moreover, I like to look at the rate for the entire coalition, not just American troops, because in terms of analyzing the war and the insurgency, any coalition troops killed are just as important; and there are several months whose death tolls are altered significantly by whether or not you include non-U.S. coalition deaths.

So my preferred graph/table to look at is this one at the Iraq Coalition Casualty website.

From the figures there, here is a comparison of the total coalition hostile deaths for each month for 2003, 2004, and 2005:


......2003..2004..2005
Jan...........39....74
Feb...........14....42
Mar.....82....35....33
Apr.....53...131....46
May......6....64....69
Jun.....24....45....69
Jul.....28....45....48
Aug.....23....63....75
Sep.....18....74....45
Oct.....35....58....58
Nov.....94...129
Dec.....32....58

As you can see, in 7 out of 10 months so far, 6 out of 10 months, and soon to be 7 (thank you Jody from Polyscifi!) the death toll in 2005 exceeds that of 2004. Which is not exactly comforting news.

That is all for now.