Summary: In Afghanistan, a spike in bloodshed has claimed the lives of 19 U.S. service members in just four days, elevating the U.S. death toll for August to 55, with 76 fatalities in total for NATO forces. … One-year retrospective: One year ago today, on September 1, 2009, Aubrey Immelman provided his weekly report of U.S. military deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan and reported that with 52 U.S. troops killed, August 2009 became the deadliest month of the deadliest year yet in the Afghanistan war; that the commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan called for a new strategy against the Taliban in an assessment of the 8-year-old conflict ordered by the U.S. Secretary of Defense; and that the number of civilians killed in Iraq shot up to 393 in August 2009, the highest level since April 2009, after a spate of mass-casualty bombings caused carnage in Baghdad and northern Iraq.

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