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BAGHDAD, Iraq - The number of civilians killed in the violence in Iraq rose sharply over the last three months, accounting for 5,000, or about 40 per cent, of the more than 12,000 who died in 2006, the Iraqi government says.

In the third full year since the U.S.-led invasion, only about half as many Iraqi soldiers died in 2006 as American troops, the government reported Tuesday.

But the number of Iraqi security forces killed jumped to 1,539 -- nearly double the American death count of 823 for the year -- when the deaths of police, who conduct paramilitary operations, are added to the number of slain Iraqi soldiers.

The civilian toll of 12,357 coupled with the security force deaths bring the overall figure reported by the ministries of Health, Defense and Interior to 13,896 -- 162 more than the tally kept by The Associated Press.

The AP count, assembled from its daily news reports, was always believed to be substantially lower than the actual number of deaths because the news cooperative does not have daily access to official accounting by the Iraqi ministries. Many deaths were thought to have gone unreported by AP.

Counts kept by other groups, including the United Nations, list far higher death tolls, which are disputed by the Iraqi government.

While the U.S. government and military provide no death totals for Iraqis, the UN Assistance Ministry for Iraq, UNAMI, does keep a count based on reports it gathers from the Baghdad morgue, Ministry of Health, and Medico-Legal Institute.

The figures for November and December are not yet available from the UN But as of the end of October, the organization had reported 26,782 deaths in the first 10 months of 2006, nearly double what the Iraqi government and the AP reported for the entire year.

In its last report, the UN said 3,709 Iraqi civilians were killed in October alone and that citizens were fleeing the country at a pace of 100,000 each month. The organization estimated at least 1.6 million Iraqis had left since the war began in March 2003.

At the time of the last UN report, Iraqi government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh called it "inaccurate and exaggerated" because it was not based on official government reports.

The UN report said Iraq's heavily armed Shiite militias were gaining strength and influence and that torture was rampant, despite the Iraqi government's vow to reduce human rights abuses.

"Hundreds of bodies continued to appear in different areas of Baghdad -- handcuffed, blindfolded and bearing signs of torture and execution-style killing," the last UNAMI report said. "Many witnesses reported that perpetrators wear militia attire and even police or army uniforms."

The two primary militias in Iraq are the military wings of the country's strongest Shiite political groups, on which Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is heavily dependent. Al-Maliki has repeatedly rejected U.S. demands that he disband the heavily armed groups, especially the Mahdi Army of radical anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.

"I think the type of violence is different in the past few months," Gianni Magazzeni, the UNAMI chief in Baghdad, said when the last report was issued in late November. "There was a great increase in sectarian violence in activities by terrorists and insurgents, but also by militias and criminal gangs."

He noted that religious clashes have been common since Sunni Arab insurgents bombed a major Shiite shrine on Feb. 22 in Samarra, north of Baghdad.

UNAMI's Human Rights Office continued to receive reports that Iraqi police and security forces have either been infiltrated by or act in collusion with militias, the report said.

It said that while sectarian violence is the main cause of the civilian killings, Iraqis also continue to be the victims of terrorist acts, roadside bombs and drive-by shootings. Others have been caught in the crossfire between rival gangs.

In its September 2006 issue, The Lancet, an independent and authoritative journal, published a study on mortality rates in Iraq.

The study estimated that 654,965 excess Iraqi deaths, including 601,027 from violence, had occurred in Iraq since the invasion of the country in March 2003.

The "confidence range" for the number of excess Iraqi deaths because of violence has been estimated at between 426,369 and 793,663, with 601,027 as the median number.

The U.S. government and Iraq as well as others, including the Iraq Body Count, an organization that has conducted other types of surveys, denied the validity of the study's findings.

The Iraqi Minister of Health, in a statement made in Vienna in early November, indicated that as many as 150,000 Iraqi civilians might have been violently killed since 2003. But there are no known statistics for the early months of the U.S.-led invasion.