US reports insurgent death toll in a shift in approach

The enemy body count is back. Sort of.

US military officials, in their regular news briefings in Iraq, have quietly begun reporting on enemy "KIA," or killed in action, after months of declining to detail the other side's losses.

The Army had long resisted inclusion of such figures, in part fearing comparison to Vietnam War days, when enemy casualties always seemed to dwarf US losses even as the war was going badly. Inflated body counts eventually became emblematic of a Pentagon spin operation unable to mask the bad news in Southeast Asia.

But the steady drumbeat of US casualties in Iraq - November was the deadliest month with 111 members of the US-led coalition killed - has apparently contributed to a shift in approach.

On Monday, Brigadier Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the Army's designated briefer here, said 54 Iraqi insurgents were killed during a series of running battles in Samarra, north of the capital. He enumerated enemy "KIA" in engagement after engagement during the Samarra clash.

The 54 reported dead was by far the highest asserted enemy death toll in months. The total was heatedly disputed in Samarra.

Kimmitt, the Army's deputy director for operations in Iraq, signalled the shift in policy a few weeks ago when he began regularly providing enemy KIA totals.

The numbers typically amounted to a handful or fewer killed per engagement, but on a few occasions as many as half a dozen or more were said to have been cut down in confrontations with U.S. forces. Most perish in combat uncovered by the media.