WASHINGTON, Oct. 24 (Xinhuanet) -- The US military has abandoned its previous refusal to publicize enemy body counts and now cites such numbers periodically to show the impact of some counterinsurgency operations, a newspaper reported Monday.

    The releases of enemy body counts have tended to be associated with either major attacks that netted significant numbers of enemy fighters or lengthy operations that have spanned days or weeks, The Washington Post reported.

    For instance, the US military reported 20 insurgents killed and one captured last Saturday in raids on five houses suspected of sheltering foreign fighters in a town near the Syrian border. Six days earlier, the 2nd Marine Division issued a statement saying an estimated 70 suspected insurgents had died in the Ramadi area as aresult of three separate airstrikes by fighter jets and helicopters.

    The Oct. 16 statement reflected some of the pitfalls associated with releasing such statistics, the report said, as the number was immediately challenged by witnesses, who said many of those killed were not insurgents but civilians, including women and children.

    Field commanders now have authority to release death tolls for isolated engagements in the interest of countering enemy propaganda and conveying the size and presumed effectiveness of some US military operations, and the release of such figures could also serve to boost the morale of US forces and bolster confidence that their plans and weapons worked effectively, the report quoted officials as saying.

    But defense specialists, such as Conrad C. Crane, director of the military history institute at the US Army War College, cautioned that enemy body counts in Iraq and Afghanistan were prone to inaccuracy and were of questionable significance, the report said. The murky nature of the conflicts, they said, make itdifficult to know at times who is an insurgent, a criminal or an innocent civilian.

    The revival of enemy body count, a practice discredited during the Vietnam War, has apparently come without formal guidance from the Pentagon's leadership, according to the report.

    During the Vietnam War, enemy body counts became a regular feature in military statements intended to demonstrate progress, but the statistics ended up providing poor indicators of the war's course when pressure on US units to produce high death tolls led to inflated tallies, the report said. Enditem