From Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty: “During a routine briefing this week in Brussels, a NATO spokesman regaled convened journalists with a 10-minute barrage of statistics. A distillation of a report given to NATO ambassadors earlier that day, the figures showed there had been a 64 percent hike in insurgent attacks in the period January-April 2009 as compared to the same period in 2008.
‘IED events’ — explosions and discoveries of Improvised Explosive Devices — had gone up by 81 percent.
Casualty figures caused by IEDs had declined by 9 percent. Civilian deaths were down by 44 percent, kidnaps and assassinations by 17 percent.”