As if he read this post, Gen. Petraeus offered his definition of sectarian violence for his tabulations: “acts taken by individual by one ethno-sectarian grouping against another.” He added that “it’s not that complicated”: if “al-Qaeda bombs a Shiite area,” it’s sectarian violence. Fair enough, but it raises the question: how do you know when a bombing in a certain area is perpetrated by al-Qaeda? Andrew Tilghman documents in the Washington Monthly how MNF-I over-attributes violence in Iraq to al-Qaeda.
One thing that Petraeus specifically denied: a senior intelligence official’s claim to the Washington Post that MNF-I tabulates sectarian killings by whether a bullet enters the head through the back or the front.
