Under-Publicized Fact of the Day

As reported by Edwin Mora:

Civilians ran a greater risk of being killed in the border city of Juarez, Mexico, last year than in Baghdad, Iraq.

The per capita rate of civilian killings in the Mexican border city in 2008 was nearly three-and-a-half times (3.4) as great as the per capita rate of civilian killings in the Iraqi province of Baghdad, CNSNews.com has determined, based on State Department statistics and data supplied by an Iraqi civilian-casualty database recommended by the Department of Defense.

In Ciudad Juarez, where drug cartels are fighting with Mexican authorities for control of the city, an estimated 1,800 people were killed in 2008, according to the U.S. State Department.

That equaled one in every 889 residents in a population that the State Department says 1.6 million.

Meanwhile, in the Baghdad Governorate (the Iraqi province that includes Baghdad), only about one in 3,040 people were killed in 2008, using the civilian casualty figures gatherd by the Iraq Body Count (IBC) project.

The overall number of civilians in Baghdad Governorate that were killed in 2008, according to IBC, was between 2,632 and 2,847.

But the Baghdad Governorate, with an estimated 6 to 8 million people, is almost four to five times larger in population than Ciudad Juarez, depending upon which figure is utilized.