The overall attacks in Iraq rose 24 percent to 792 each week and the daily Iraqi civilian casualties increased by 51 percent to nearly 120 over the past three months, the U.S. Defense Department said Friday.

In a quarterly report mandated by Congress, the Pentagon said the core conflict in Iraq had changed from a battle against insurgents into a fight between Shiite and Sunni Muslims, who were vying to control key areas in Baghdad, protect sectarian enclaves, divert economic resources and impose their own political and religious agendas.

Sectarian violence was spreading in Iraq, and conditions that could lead to civil war existed in Iraq, said the 63-page report, the fifth of its kind.

The report, nevertheless, said that the current violence in Iraq was not a civil war, and movement toward a civil war could be prevented.

Calling the current security environment in Iraq the most complex since the war started in March 2003, the report said " death squads and terrorists are locked in mutually reinforcing cycles of sectarian strife," and the that the Sunni-led insurgency "remains potent and viable."

Some ordinary Iraqis now looked to illegal militia's to provide for their safety and sometimes for social needs and welfare, according to the report.

The United States has increased the number of its troops in Iraq to 140,000 over the past five weeks, with some 15,000 deployed in Baghdad, mainly due to increased violence in the Iraqi capital.

Source: Xinhua