BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) – Mothers carrying groceries home to their families. Children walking to or from school. Unemployed men loitering around street corners in hopes of finding odd jobs.

Ordinary Iraqis are often the victims of roadside bombs set by insurgents that miss their targets – one reason that more than 4,000 civilians were killed in insurgency-related violence last year, according to government figures obtained Thursday by The Associated Press.

That’s more than twice the death toll of the country’s soldiers and police combined.

And the civilian death count in the first two months of this year already stands at more than one-quarter of last year’s total – in part a result of sectarian violence triggered by the Feb. 22 bombing of a Shiite shrine and car bombings in Shiite neighborhoods around Baghdad.

The large number of civilian deaths – many in Baghdad, where 25 percent of the population lives – has created a climate of fear where parents are afraid to send their children to school, women spend their days huddled inside their homes, and husbands send wives and children abroad.

Figures compiled by the Health Ministry put the civilian death toll for 2005 at 4,024. The ministry’s civilian death count for the first two months of this year is 1,093.

Death tolls for the police and army are compiled by the ministries of Interior and Defense. Their figures show that 1,695 police and soldiers were killed last year. Most of the victims – 1,222 – were from the ranks of the police.

That pattern has continued through January and February of this year – when 155 policemen and 44 soldiers died. Iraqi soldiers as a rule have better body armor and make better use of armored vehicles. Many Iraqi police patrol the dangerous streets of Baghdad and other cities in cars and pickup trucks without armor.

There is no way to verify the figures independently. In a dangerous country as large as California, journalists rely on figures provided by local police, hospitals and the Interior Ministry.

Figures in major attacks often vary widely, with police spokesmen giving different figures to different Iraqi and international news organizations. In some cases, Interior Ministry death counts in major car bombings are different from the totals provided up the chain of command by subordinate police units.

In some cases the discrepancy is a result of the difficulty in counting bodies ripped apart by fierce explosions. In others, politicians may be inflating figures to draw attention to the suffering of their community.

If tallies are standardized days later, news organizations have moved on to reporting other violence and may be unaware that early figures have been adjusted.

An Associated Press count from April 28, when the current government took office, through December 2005 found that at least 3,375 Iraqi civilians and at least 1,561 Iraqi security personnel were killed.

The Brookings Institution estimates that between 5,696 and 9,934 civilians were killed in Iraq during all of 2005. Brookings estimates at least 2,569 Iraqi military and police were killed during the year, based on a monthly count by a Web site, icasualties.org.

Regardless of the precise figures, virtually all studies agree that among government security forces, the police are at greater risk than the army. And Iraqi civilians die in greater numbers than the military and the police.

That reflects the nature of the Iraq conflict, now approaching its fourth year.

Since the fall of Baghdad and the end of major combat in April 2003, the Iraq war has been increasingly fought by triggering a bomb on a crowded street, or a drive-by shooting of a policeman or an ambush of an American patrol.

The increased use by insurgents of roadside bombs – often targeted at convoys of police, soldiers or foreign security contractors – can have devastating effects on civilians.

But civilians can also be targets themselves. Sunni religious extremists kill Shiites, whom they consider heretics and collaborators with the Americans. Death squads from both communities hunt down members of the rival sect in retaliation for offenses committed against their own group.

Such attacks have accelerated following the Dec. 15 parliamentary election, as extremists in the insurgent ranks seek to derail formation of a new government of national unity including Sunni Arabs, the backbone of the insurgency.

U.S. officials fear those attacks might increase because talks among the Sunni Arab, Shiite and Kurdish communities have broken down. The Iraqis are already behind schedule on their constitutional timetable for establishing the new government.

Step one in the process is supposed to be the convening of the 275-member parliament, which was to have opened within 15 days of the final certification of the results. The results were certified Feb. 10, but the new parliament has not convened.

Since the early months of the U.S.-led occupation, civilian casualties have been a major image problem for the Bush administration. The U.S. military studiously avoided providing any estimates of civilian deaths.

As the conflict dragged on and the number of car bombs and suicide attacks increased, U.S. officials shifted strategy, instead highlighting attacks on civilians and attributing most of them to al-Qaida in Iraq.

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