With total of 12,282 civilian killed and another 23,126 injured in Iraq, the year 2014 becomes the deadliest since 2006 and 2007, the United Nations said Friday.
“Yet again, the Iraqi ordinary citizen continues to suffer from violence and terrorism,” Nickolay Mladenov, the UN secretary- general’s special representative and head of UNAMI, said in a press release.
In December alone, 1,101 Iraqis were killed and another 1,868 wounded in “acts of terrorism and violence.”
UNAMI also noted that Baghdad, the Iraqi capital, was the worst- affected governorate for the month of December with a total of 1, 051 casualties reported.
The numbers might be underestimated given the difficulties in conducting on-the-ground verifications of casualty figures. The UN mission said that the figures reported “have to be considered as the absolute minimum.”
In 2013, the U.N. reported 7,818 Iraqi civilians killed.