While U.S. Denies It, Forbes Reports 100,000 Iraqis Now Displaced by Sectarian Violence

The last report about six weeks ago showed 36,000 Iraqis displaced, but with big questions about how many went uncounted. Now, with the U.S. still denying it's a "significant" number, we're already up to 100K displaced and an untold number D-E-A-D.

From Forbes Magazine:

Sectarian violence has forced about 100,000 families across Iraq to flee their homes, a top Iraqi official said, and 16 Iraqis were killed Saturday, six of them tortured in captivity.

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

Other estimates of the number of displaced families have been lower.

Dr. Salah Abdul-Razzaq, spokesman of the Shiite Endowment, a government body that runs Shiite 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 Shiite 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 Shiites and Sunnis away from religiously mixed areas, despite reports to the contrary by Iraqi officials.

In Saturday'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 early Saturday and shot them to death, said police Capt. Muthana Khalidin. The town, 43 miles south of Baghdad, is near the mostly Shiite city of Musayyib.

Eight other Iraqis were killed in scattered violence.