According to casualty figures released today by the United Nations, attacks and other violence in Iraq killed 979 people in October, the exact number that were killed the month before. Of these, 852 were civilians and 127 were Iraqi soldiers or police. The violence there has escalated in recent months, inflamed by sectarian and political tension following an April crackdown on a Sunni protest camp that set off almost daily retaliation by extremists and al-Qaida insurgents. Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said Thursday that some of the violence is a result of spillover from the Syrian civil war and asked the international community for help fighting the deadly insurgency.
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