BAGHDAD — For U.S. troops, October was a month of gritty skirmishes against fighters religiously motivated to risk their lives during the holy Muslim month of Ramadan.
October's death toll, the highest for American forces in nearly two years, came during a period without conventional battles or catastrophic helicopter crashes.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Thursday November 02, 2006 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 0 inches; 37 words Type of Material: Correction
Iraq war casualties: The right edge of a map in Wednesday's Section A that showed the hometowns of slain U.S. troops did not print, causing the name of the Massachusetts city of Malden to appear as Malder.
Rather, the 103 troops killed in Baghdad and across Iraq were victims of a steady onslaught of assaults, primarily by their longtime nemeses, Sunni Arab insurgents.
The number of attacks on American forces increased in October to unprecedented levels, U.S. military officials said.
"There has been a much more considered effort to specifically target coalition and Iraqi security forces," Army Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, the spokesman for U.S.-led forces in Iraq, told reporters in Baghdad as the month wore on. "There has been a steady increase in the number of attacks specifically against security forces."
There were 224 Iraqi security forces and 1,315 civilians killed in October.
It was a month in which U.S. forces were shot by snipers, struck by rocket-propelled grenades or lured into ambushes where they were sprayed with automatic-weapon fire from the AK-47s found in so many Iraqi homes.
But improvised explosive devices left along roads remained the weapon of choice for Iraq's anti-American insurgency.
Despite jamming devices, tactical adjustments and the increased armoring of military vehicles, at least 51 of the U.S. deaths resulted from makeshift bombs detonated by remote control from a comfortable distance.
At least 43 deaths occurred in Baghdad, indicating a shifting focus away from the Sunni heartland toward Iraq's capital "due to our more deliberate presence, more active involvement out there," Caldwell said last week.
U.S. forces were more exposed than usual in Baghdad because of an ongoing offensive aimed at taking back the streets from the forces of sectarian warfare -- Sunni insurgents and Shiite Muslim militiamen, some allied with officials of the Shiite-dominated Iraqi government.
Though U.S. officials say the Shiite militias dominating Iraq's south pose the biggest long-term threat to the country's stability, the vast majority of the Americans were killed in Sunni-dominated areas.
