What's going on in Basra?

Over the past week, there have been three fatal attacks and six British combat deaths in the Basra region. This may be unusual.

Using Icasaulties.org as my data source, I pulled all British fatalities from May 1, 2003 to yesterday afternoon, sorted them out by combat/non-combat cause and counted the number of fatal combat encounters. During this entire period, the most fatal attacks in at single month were three fatality causing attacks. This maximum has occurred numerous times. The British have suffered 81 combat deaths. The most common number of fatal attacks per month was zero. The mean was 1.68 fatal attacks per month with a standard deviation of 2.39, so six fatalities in a single month is on the high end of typical variation. If we remove a single outlier, when an RAF Hercules transport was shot down in January 2005 with ten people aboard, six combat deaths in a month is a statistically unusual event.

Even without manipulating the data at all, and making this very simple assumption that a combat death is completely indepedent of any other combat death, the unusual thing is not the six British combat deaths in the month of April 2007, but the fact that we are not even a week into the month and we are already at the edge of typical experience.

So what could be causing this? There are a couple of different and potentially parrallel explanations. The most benign is that the British military is experiencing a run of bad luck. Previous attacks that only wounded soldiers killed soldiers etc. Another is that new technologies are allowing attacks to have a higher expected lethality. We are seeing some reports that the IED that was used to kill four British soldiers this week was a EFP. This report states that the British military and Iraqi police have not seen this type of IED in that region until very recently. A third explanation is that the factional fighitng in Baghdad is spilling over and causing some factions to start taking more shots at the British because the British are seen as aiding a factional opponent.

Right now I do not have enough information to really say anything definative. All I know is that something potentially interesting and different may be occurring in Basra and we should be keeping an eye on that city.