In the pavement cafés, people moan that the structure is bigger than anything Saddam Hussein built. They are not impressed by the architects' claims that the diplomatic outpost will be visible from space and cover an area that is larger than the Vatican city and big enough to accommodate four Millennium Domes. They are more interested in knowing whether the US State Department paid for the prime real estate or simply took it.

While families in the capital suffer electricity cuts, queue all day to fuel their cars and wait for water pipes to be connected, the US mission due to open in June next year will have its own power and water plants to cater for a population the size of a small town.

Officially, the design of the compound is supposed to be a secret, but you cannot hide the giant construction cranes and the concrete contours of the 21 buildings that are taking shape. Looming over the skyline, the embassy has the distinction of being the only big US building project in Iraq that is on time and within budget.

In a week when Washington revealed a startling list of missed deadlines and overspending on building projects, Congress was told that the bill for the embassy was $592 million (£312 million).

The heavily guarded 42-hectare (104-acre) site - which will have a 15ft thick perimeter wall - has hundreds of workers swarming on scaffolding. Local residents are bitter that the Kuwaiti contractor has employed only foreign staff and is busing them in from a temporary camp nearby.

After roughing it in Saddam's abandoned palaces, diplomats should have every comfort in their new home. There will be impressive residences for the Ambassador and his deputy, six apartments for senior officials, and two huge office blocks for 8,000 staff to work in. There will be what is rumoured to be the biggest swimming pool in Iraq, a state-of-the-art gymnasium, a cinema, restaurants offering delicacies from favourite US food chains, tennis courts and a swish American Club for evening functions.

The security measures being installed are described as extraordinary. US officials are preparing for the day when the so-called green zone, the fortified and sealed-off compound where international diplomats and Iraq's leaders live and work, is reopened to the rest of the city's residents, and American diplomats can retreat to their own secure area.

Iraqi politicians opposed to the US presence protest that the scale of the project suggests that America retains long-term ambitions here. The International Crisis Group, a think-tank, said the embassy's size "is seen by Iraqis as an indication of who actually exercises power in their country".

A State Department official said that the size reflected the "massive amount of work still facing the US and our commitment to see it through".

BEHIND SCHEDULE
# A US Inspector General's report into reconstruction found that although $22 billion had been spent, water, sewage and electricity, infrastructure still operated at prewar levels

# Despite "significant progress" in recent months, less than half the water and electricity projects have been completed

# Only six of the 150 planned health centres have been completed

# US officials spent $70 million on medical equipment for health clinics that are unlikely ever to be built. More than 75 per cent of the funds for the 150 planned clinics have been allocated

# Task Force Shield, the $147 million programme to train Iraqi security units to protect key oil and electrical sites failed to meet its goals. A fraud investigation is under way

# Oil production was 2.18 million barrels per day in the last week of March. Before the war it was 2.6 million

On one of the days when multiple car bombs drained the blood and souls of scores in Baghdad, my closest friend wrote from there: "Dahr, This is a very sad letter I'm writing you as a friend. My tears are coming down due to the humiliation, suffering, frustration, thwarting defeat and discomfiture we the Iraqi are living in. Please let people know some of the news of what is happening to my country, my people and my religion."

Death lurks everywhere in Iraq today. Keeping up with the numbers of dead is impossible. A doctor working at one of the larger hospitals in Baghdad recently called it a "camp" because the courtyard of the hospital is constantly filled with members of the Shia Badr militia, who continue to carry out their death squad activities of killing Sunnis and rival Shia. "The Badr are all over the hospital, looking for people," said the doctor. "The injured brought here sometimes die before even reaching the ward, because the Badr are being obstacles for us. One of the men running our morgue was killed by the Badr. My friends are warning me to be careful, to keep my mouth shut."

The numbers are being hidden … and the Badr, operating out of the Ministry of Interior, which is funded by the US, are making sure the numbers remain shrouded.

Yet on Tuesday of this week, a spokesman at that same hospital, speaking on condition of anonymity of course, announced that in the last 48 hours alone Yarmouk Hospital had received 65 bodies, most of them slaughtered by death squads in execution-style murders. That day they had received 40 bodies, and Monday, 25.

Iraqis are at far greater risk when they speak out about the true number of the dead than western journalists. Those who speak out jeopardize their lives, like Faik Bakir, the director of the Baghdad morgue. Bakir fled Iraq fearing for his life in early March, after reporting that over 7,000 people had been killed by death squads in recent months. In an article in the Guardian on March 2nd, it was made clear by John Pace, a UN official who worked in Iraq until February, that "The vast majority of bodies showed signs of summary execution - many with their hands tied behind their back. Some showed evidence of torture, with arms and leg joints broken by electric drills." He said that the killings had been ongoing long before the rampant bloodshed that followed the bombing of the Shia shrine in Samarra. The article added, "Mr. Pace, whose contract in Iraq ended last month, said many killings were carried out by Shia militias linked to the interior ministry run by Bayan Jabr, a leading figure in the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (Sciri)."

This past Saturday I received information from the main morgue in Baghdad from a doctor there, name withheld for security reasons. "Yesterday we received 36 bodies from the police pickups. All of them are unknown, without IDs, and we don't have refrigerators to put them in since all of ours are completely full already. So we had to keep them on the ground. 12 of them were handcuffed, most of them received between 2 and 10 bullets, some many more than 10. We are not going to put them into biopsy. Reason for their death is known. Most of them are between 20 to 30 years … This is the number that was brought directly to us in one day, plus there are the dead who are sent to the hospitals. They will be put in the hospitals' morgues. We don't receive bodies from hospitals nowadays, because we don't have a place to keep them. I can't tell the exact number of killed people now, but it depends on the situation. But what I can assure you of is that since the shrine explosion, deaths have almost doubled. Daily, we receive between 70 to 80 bodies … you can see within these 40 minutes that I've talked with you, we received 9 bodies. Nearly every morning the count will be doubled twice this number, for the police find them at night. Most are either found in the streets or killed without sending them to hospitals. Four days ago we received 24 bodies in just 2 hours."

At this same morgue back in June 2004, I interviewed the aforementioned director, Dr. Faiq Bakir, who had to flee for his life. He said that their maximum holding capacity with the freezers was 90 bodies, and since January 2004 an average of well over 600 bodies each month had been brought there. The cause of death for at least half of these were gunshots or explosions. He also pointed out that those numbers did not include the heavy fighting areas of Fallujah and Najaf.

In addition, he told me, "We deal only with suspicious deaths, not deaths from natural causes. And so many bodies are buried that never go to a morgue anywhere."

According to Dr. Bakir, the rate of bodies brought to the Baghdad Morgue even back then was 3-4 times greater than it ever was during the regime of Saddam Hussein. "I am sure that not all of the bodies that should come here do," he continued before very diplomatically adding, "Because our legal system has some problems right now."

Before the invasion, there was a coordinated system between Baghdad and the other governorates, which allowed his morgue to track deaths throughout the country, but this too had been smashed along with the rest of the infrastructure of his country.

More recently, a doctor at another hospital shared information which puts this in clearer perspective.

This past Sunday, a doctor from al-Numan hospital in the al-Adhamiya district of Baghdad reported to my source in Baghdad: "Every major hospital has either one or two refrigerators, depending on the population of the area. As for Adhamiya we have one refrigerator that holds a maximum of 10 bodies. Meanwhile there are two refrigerators in the Shula hospital. We have not less than 18 major hospitals inside Baghdad, in addition to the main morgue, which has 6 refrigerators that contain 20 bodies each. In the emergencies we use refrigeration trucks to put bodies inside - this is very familiar to the main morgue. I went there a week ago. I have seen three refrigeration trucks inside the yard. They were filled with bodies. They keep the bodies in the main morgue for not more than 15 days, and if no one asks for them, they send the bodies to the cemetery administration to deal with them. This administration hands the bodies to some individuals who will bury them, mostly in Najaf or in the cemeteries around Baghdad."

Reuters recently ran a story titled, "In Baghdad, some killings get noticed, some don't." The story read, "When gunmen killed a sister of an Iraqi vice president on Thursday, it grabbed world headlines. A few streets away, however, another slaying, typical of hundreds in Baghdad in recent weeks, went all but unnoticed. Indeed it might never have been recorded had 73-year-old Khatab al-Ani not been shot outside the home of a journalist." The only part of this I would amend is "in recent weeks," because I know for a fact that random unreported killings have been the norm in the capital city of Iraq for over two years now.

Another Iraqi source of mine works for an Iraqi relief NGO in Fallujah. He told me that from the April and November 2004 US assaults on Fallujah there were a minimum of 4,500 dead or missing (most of them dead), and "killings in Fallujah and Ramadi are a daily reality for us." According to this source, "Doctors in Fallujah estimate that an average of 3.5 people are being killed in Fallujah every day during 2006, while doctors we know in Baghdad estimate that the number there is between 150 and 200 per day."

He went on to say, "The Lancet reported over 100,000 killed over a year ago. This was even before many of the crimes committed by US troops, the Iraqi so-called Army and the Government militias, who are all first class killers, came to light. This brings the number to over 200,000 at the least. On the other hand, those people (Bush and those claiming less than 100,000 dead) not reporting the correct number of civilian casualties - that is a major crime in itself. It looks like they don't give a damn how many Iraqi people get killed."

Even the UN Integrated Regional Information Networks (IRIN) humanitarian news agency reported on April 26 that "More than 90 women become widows each day due to continuing violence countrywide, according to government officials and non-governmental organizations devoted to women's issues."

Another extremely telling point in the IRIN report is that "Although few reliable statistics are available on the total number of widows in Iraq, the Ministry of Women's Affairs says that there are at least 300,000 in Baghdad alone, with another eight million throughout the country." The report said that at least 15 police officers' wives are widowed every day, and that local NGOs in Iraq said the situation had become much worse since the 2003 US-led invasion of the country, which has brought horrific violence on a level not seen before.

"Saddam Hussein was responsible for killing thousands of men during his 25 years of brutal rule," said Ibtissam Kamal in the IRIN report. Kamal, a member of a local organization that works on the issue but prefers anonymity of the organization for security reasons, added, "But more people have died during the past three years, most of them men …"

The vast majority of deaths in Iraq are not being counted. Anyone who has spent any time there knows this. It was and remains common knowledge amongst my colleagues who worked on the streets, rather than those "embedding" or conducting "hotel journalism."

Several of my colleagues who have reported from Iraq feel the number of Iraqis killed during the occupation far exceeds 100,000.

"If one counts excess mortality from collapsed healthcare, polluted water, poverty and the like - at least 100,000 Iraqis have died since the US invaded Iraq," Christian Parenti, author of the book The Freedom: Shadows and Hallucinations in Occupied Iraq wrote me this week. Parenti, who has reported for over 5 months from Iraq and is a regularly contributor to The Nation magazine, added, "How many people have been killed by US troops? How many in sectarian violence? It's impossible to say, but the point is this: Iraq has been destroyed by the US invasion and the process of its disintegration will go on for years. It is a horror no matter what the numbers are."

David Enders, an American freelance journalist who has spent 18 months reporting from Iraq and author of the book Baghdad Bulletin, told me yesterday, "I visited the Baghdad morgue, and they were receiving between 30-40 bodies every day. That didn't include car bombs and people who'd died for obvious reasons. That was more than a year ago, and that was just for Baghdad. I think it's probably safe to say that well over 100,000 Iraqis have died during the occupation."

Veteran Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk writes for the Independent in the UK and has reported from the region for over 30 years. He had this to say in a piece written on March 20th titled, "The Iraq War: Three Years On - The march of folly that has led to a bloodbath":

"The Iraqis? Well, they are lesser beings whose casualties cannot be revealed to us by the Iraqi ministry of health, on orders from the Americans and British; creatures whose suffering, far greater than our own, must be submerged in the democracy and freedom in which we are drowning them; whose casualties "more or less" [mocking the infamous quote from George W. Bush] are probably nearer to 150,000. After all, if 1,000 Iraqis could die by violence last July - in Baghdad alone; and if they are being killed at 60 or 70 a day, then we have a near genocidal bloodbath on our hands. Iraqis, however, are now our Untermenschen for whom, frankly, we do not greatly care."

By far and away the survey that comes closest to the true number of dead in Iraq to date was the one conducted for the Lancet. Yet even Les Roberts, the lead author of that report and one of the world's top epidemiologists with the Center for International Emergency Disaster and Refugee Studies at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said this February that there might be as many as 300,000 Iraqi civilian deaths generated by the US invasion and occupation. So as not to skew the results, it is important to note that the survey did not include areas where major combat had occurred such as Fallujah, Najaf, and Sadr City - home to roughly three million Iraqis.

Any news agency, government, or other organization reporting anything less are actively attempting to hide the level of slaughter and mayhem and thus aiding and abetting the ongoing war crimes in Iraq.

My aforementioned friend in Fallujah is both frustrated and angry that most news agencies choose not to report the number of dead in Iraq more accurately. "I know there are some organizations who claim that they have an accurate count, which is less than 40,000 dead Iraqis," he wrote me recently. He went on to reference Bush Junior, "And as if that number itself isn't shameful enough for the US and the whole world to see. Anyone claiming that low number who calls himself a humanitarian is a shameful guy."

we leave civilian dead as litter in the streets ignored by us their numbers unmarked as are their names - Labi Siffre

Anyone who's been in a war zone knows what it feels like to lie in bed at night listening to the cracking of gunfire, or the sound of thudding bombs. Knowing that each report means death or maiming. It is true that the dead do not talk, but each shot fired or bomb detonated means someone is dead, and the killers know and must live with that knowledge forever - that they have killed a human being.

And we cannot escape that knowledge either.

Not hearing the sounds of death, but knowing that somewhere this instant in Iraq is a family that will have to suffer a loss in perpetuity.

Your silence will not protect you ... - Audre Lorde

The number of U.S. troop fatalities in April was 73, of whom 61 were killed by hostile action. This marked rises of more than 200 percent from the 34 fatalities in March, of whom 29 were killed by hostile action, according to official U.S. figures.

These figures reversed the previous positive trend in falling U.S. military fatalities in Iraq from mid-January through March

The latest wave of casualties confirms another grim trend we have been tracking for more than half a year in this column: The failure of U.S. coalition and allied Iraqi security forces to be able to come up with an effective counter-tactic to neutralize the effectiveness of improvised explosive devices or IEDs.

According to the Iraq Index Project of the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank, IEDs have been responsible for more than 38 percent of all U.S. deaths in Iraq, including those from non-hostile causes, for every month since May 2005. In April, they were responsible for the deaths of 43 U.S. troops, or 59.7 percent of all those who died in Iraq that month ether in accidents or by hostile action.

In all, IEDs have been responsible for the deaths of 779 U.S. soldiers, or 32.5.7 percent of all fatalities in Iraq including non-combat ones from the start of military operations in March 2003 through April 30, the Iraq Index Project said.

The total number of U.S. troops killed in Iraq through April 30 since the start of U.S. operations to topple Saddam Hussein on March 19, 2003, was 2,407, according to official figures issued by the Department of Defense.

The 2.35 per day fatality average over the 20 days from April 13 to May 2 marks a rise of 30 percent on the rate of 1.65 U.S. troop fatalities per day in the previous 68 day period from Feb. 4 to April 12.

However, the 2.35 per day figure is still a vast improvement on the 33 U.S. soldiers killed in only seven days from Jan. 11 through Jan. 17, an average of 4.7 soldiers killed per day and on the figure of 28 in the Jan. 4-10 period when the average death rate was four U.S. soldiers killed per day.

The rate at which U.S. soldiers are being injured in Iraq also remains high. As of April 30, 17,874 U.S. soldiers have been injured in Iraq since the start of hostilities to topple Saddam Hussein on March 19, 2003. That was an increase of 325 wounded in 20 days at an average rate of 16.25 per day. This rate marked a significant increase on the figure of 943 wounded in the previous 68 days, at an average rate of just below 13.9 wounded per day, according to figures issued by the DOD.

The rate art which U.S. soldiers have been wounded per day in Iraq has therefore been slowly but inexorably rising since the end of January. The average rate was 11.6 per day injured from Jan. 30 through Feb. 3, when 58 U.S. soldiers were injured, according to the DOD figures. The latest figure is more than twice as high as the rate of 7.4 U.S. soldiers injured per day during the Jan. 11-17 period. And it is even worse than the very high figure of 91 U.S. soldiers wounded during the Jan. 4-10 period at an average rate of 13 per day.

As of April 30, 8,194 of those troops were wounded so seriously that they were listed as "WIA Not RTD" in the DOD figures. In other words: Wounded in Action Not Returned to Duty, an increase of 136 such casualties in 20 days at an average rate of 6.8 per day. This marks a rise of more than 20 percent in this figure from the previous 68 day period when U.S. forces suffered 375 such casualties at an average rate of 5.5 per day.

The March and April figures also reverse the positive trend of October through January when the number of U.S. troops wounded in action per month steadily fell. It dropped from 618 in October, through 466 in November and 408 in December to 309 in January. But the total number of U.S. troops wounded per month in Iraq reached 355 in February and 443 in March. It fell, however, to 366 -- still unfortunately above the February figure - in April.

The casualty figures suggest that the insurgency is not dramatically increasing the scale of its attacks on U.S. forces, but that it is growing more proficient than ever with its employment of IEDs, and that despite the priority Pentagon planners have certainly given to combating the problem, U.S. combat vehicles in Iraq remain vulnerable to them.

The cumulative impact of all these figures is that the conclusion we drew in our Jan. 18 analysis remains unchanged: The Sunni Muslim insurgency in Iraq has not so far shown signs of dramatically metastasizing in recent weeks, but it has been able to return to and maintain its old formidable levels following a lull for the Iraqi parliamentary elections in December. And it has remained remarkably impervious to both the broad political strategies and the tactical military initiatives that U.S. political leaders and military commanders have sought to apply against it.

Two British hostages, Margaret Hassan and Ken Bigley, were executed by their captors.

Mr Bräunlich, 32, and Mr Nitzschke, 28, arrived at Tegel airport in Berlin yesterday looking pale and exhausted but apparently unharmed. "We are very happy to be alive. It was something we didn't take for granted," said Mr Bräunlich. He thanked the German government for getting him out, adding: "We are happy to be here again. We had a difficult time."

The engineers, from Leipzig in east Germany, were seized on January 24 outside their workplace, an Iraqi-owned detergent factory in the industrial town of Baiji, 110 miles north of Baghdad. German officials swiftly established that their captors were not holding them for political reasons. Instead they wanted to make money, diplomats said.

Asked yesterday whether Germany had paid a ransom, the foreign minister, Franz-Walter Steinmeier, said: "We will of course say nothing about the concrete details regarding their release." He thanked the US, Britain, France and "other partners in the region" for helping to get the men out after three months in "inhuman conditions".

Although the release is a success for Germany's chancellor, Angela Merkel, who last night held talks with the US president, George Bush, in Washington, there are questions about the wisdom of paying large ransoms to Iraqi gangs.

Yesterday, Rolfeckhard Giermann, who spent five years in Baghdad as east Germany's trade attache, said it was a signal to potential kidnappers "that you can earn good money with German hostages". He told the Sächsische Zeitung newspaper: "This simply strengthens Iraq's kidnapping industry."

When the men were taken hostage, there was speculation that Germans were being targeted because Berlin, unlike Washington or London, had a habit of paying ransoms. Their kidnapping came a month after Susanne Osthoff, a German woman working in Iraq, was freed from captivity. German diplomats admitted the government paid $5m (£2.7m) for her release.

High-profile examples include a case in 2003 when at least €5m (£3.4m) was paid to secure the release of 14 tourists kidnapped in the Sahara desert.

The release is good news for Mr Steinmeier, who has emerged as a skilled crisis manager since he became foreign minister in November.

More than 200 foreigners and thousands of Iraqis have been kidnapped since the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Most foreign hostages have been released. But 55 foreign hostages have been reported executed by their Iraqi captors - 41 in 2004, 13 last year, and one so far this year.