THE number of violent deaths in Iraq topped 100 a day last month as the country descended into open sectarian warfare.

Almost as shocking is that the number killed in May and June was greater than the number of injured: Iraq’s health care system is close to collapse and can no longer care for the wounded.

The statistics were compiled by the United Nations mission that monitors Iraq from outside the country because its headquarters were blown up by terrorists almost three years ago.

They show that the death toll reached 2,669 in May and 3,149 in June, and that 14,338 civilians have been killed this year.

“The emerging phenomenon of Iraqis killing Iraqis on a daily basis is nothing less than a catastrophe,” said Ashraf Qazi, the UN envoy to Baghdad.

The figures also show that in May and June 5,762 civilians were wounded, fractionally less than the number killed.

The reason, according to Iraqi medical officials, is that doctors are too terrified to do their jobs following a deliberate campaign of murder, kidnap and intimidation.

Baghdad’s medical facilities are simply overwhelmed by the daily carnage. They were stripped down by a decade of UN sanctions, looted after the US invasion and then slowly rebuilt to cope with a peacetime city than never materialised. There are only 30 intensive care beds in the capital.

The Ministry of Health has been taken over by supporters of Moqtada al-Sadr, the rebel Shia cleric, who have little medical experience.

Adel Abdel-Mohsin, the Deputy Health Minister, told The Times that 190 medical staff had been murdered and 400 doctors kidnapped and that 1,000 doctors had fled the country.

“They are soft targets, easy to get and that’s why the hospitals are out of control in some areas. There have been raids or insults by gunmen or security forces storming the place and beating the doctors because there is no proper protection,” Mr Abdel-Mohsin said.

Doctors have been kidnapped for money by criminals, murdered by insurgents because they are viewed as government workers, or shot by militias because they work in hospitals in areas dominated by a different sectarian community, be it Sunni or Shia.

In this country full of guns, grieving relatives or angry comrades-in-arms have been known to beat or even murder doctors when a patient dies on the operating table.

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