Lights Out in Baghdad

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A team of geographers at the University of California Los Angeles thinks the February 2007 military surge in Iraq is getting more credit than it deserves. With the use of satellites, the geographers have tracked the amount of light emitted in Baghdad neighborhoods at night and found some interesting results. Details after the jump. From Science Daily:"Night light in neighborhoods populated primarily by embattled Sunni residents declined dramatically just before the February 2007 surge and never returned, suggesting that ethnic cleansing by rival Shiites may have been largely responsible for the decrease in violence for which the U.S. military has claimed credit, the team reports in a new study based on publicly available satellite imagery.""'Essentially, our interpretation is that violence has declined in Baghdad because of intercommunal violence that reached a climax as the surge was beginning,' said lead author John Agnew, a UCLA professor of geography and authority on ethnic conflict. 'By the launch of the surge, many of the targets of conflict had either been killed or fled the country, and they turned off the lights when they left.'"Thanks (again), Jeff.