Compared with the previous week when almost a thousand people were crushed or drowned in a panic stampede on the Aimma Bridge over the Tigris River in Baghdad, almost any news would have sounded good by comparison. But the figures for U.S. troops killed and wounded -- the latter figure in many respects a more statistically broad and revealing indicator on how the insurgency is faring -- were both significantly down. And the number of Iraqi police and troops killed showed a welcome fall too.

The lower casualties may reflect the current U.S. and allied Iraqi drive against the insurgent stronghold of Tel Afar, west of Mosul in northern Iraq, forcing the guerrillas to concentrate their forces on the defensive rather than being free to fan out and carry out their customary level of assassinations and attacks.

According to official Department of Defense figures cited by the Iraq Index Project of the Brookings Institution, in the seven days up to Wednesday, Sept. 7 this week, only eight U.S. soldiers died in Iraq, and only three of those were killed in action.

This was less than a quarter of the 13 U.S. soldiers killed during the previous eight days from Aug. 24 to Aug. 31. If this low rate of attrition could be maintained for the rest of the month, September's fatal casualties could be as low as 36, less than half the 90 who died in August.

By Wednesday, Sept. 7, the total U.S. military dead in Iraq from the start of major combat operations on March 19, 2003 was 1,890 of whom 1,470 were killed in action and 420 in non -hostile incidents, the IIP said.

During the eight days of Aug. 24-31, two U.S. soldiers died every day in Iraq. But from Sept. 1 to Sept. 7, less than one U.S. soldier was killed in action every two days, an improvement of more than 400 percent. At that rate, far from 1,000 U.S. soldiers dying per year in Iraq -- as would be the case if the casualties inflicted by the insurgents during the previous week could have been maintained - these figures, if maintained, would bring fatalities down to around 35 a year.

Of course, this week may turn out to be a misleading lull, and improbably good, just as last week's figures may prove to have been exceptionally bad, and trends have to be maintained to have long term significance. Still, the figure of U.S. troops wounded across Iraq -- a figure that as repeatedly given more reliable indicators than fatalities as to the overall depth and strength of the insurgency, were also very significantly down.

The number of U.S. troops wounded in action from the beginning of hostilities on March 19, 2003, through Wednesday, Sept. 7, was 14,362, an increase of 97 over the previous eight day period of Aug.24-31, the IIP said. This was a rate more than 50 percent lower than the 145 injured from Aug. 24 to Aug. 31, and almost identical to the 99 wounded in the previous six-day period from Aug. 18 to Aug. 23, according to the DOD figures.

These figures were also a little, but discernibly lower than the two weeks of Aug.3-10, when 108 U.S. troops were injured and July 28 to Aug. 3, when 112 were injured.

The rate at which Iraqi police and security forces were killed by the insurgents was also very significantly down from the previous week.

Some 54 Iraqi police and troops were killed from Sept. 1 to Sept. 7 compared with 67 of them killed in the eight days from Aug. 24 to Aug. 31. That drops the average of Iraqi soldiers being killed to just under eight per day from 8.5 per day, compared to 83 killed in the six days from Aug. 18 to Aug. 24, an average of just under 14 fatalities per day. These figures are still far too high, but at least they suggest, in the short term, movement in the right direction.

But although this was a welcome fall in insurgent activity against Iraqi forces compared with the previous week, it still marked a significant increase in fatalities inflicted on them compared with the 48 killed from Aug. 10- 17 and the 56 killed the week before that.

In all, that brought the total number of Iraqi police and military killed from June 1, 2003 to Wednesday, Sept. 7 to 3,105 according to the IIP figures.

If maintained through September, that attrition rate would be close to that inflicted in August when the insurgents killed 282 Iraqi police and security forces. That projection would, therefore, maintain the modest improvement on the record 304 killed in July and the 296 killed in June. But it would still rival August which was the third-worst month of the insurgency so far in terms of the number of fatalities inflicted on Iraqi forces.

The figures confirmed our previous observation in this column that the nationwide insurgency remains capable of inflicting casualties severe and consistent enough to render any national army or police force ineffective, even though there does now appear at last to b hope of a modest improvement in sight.

And two cautions need to be added: The first is that, as noted in our previous "Benchmarks" column, political efforts to get the political leadership of the 20 percent Sunni Muslim minority in Iraq to accept the new draft constitution appear to have broken down irrevocably. And as Michael Eisenstadt of the Washington Institute for Near East policy warned, that means the insurgency could have the potential to metastasize and become far larger and more popular with in the Sunni community.

And second, on Wednesday, 16 people were killed and 21 injured in a single car bomb attack -- and there were others -- in the southern predominantly Shiite port city of Basra. This attack underlined a disturbing trend little remarked upon in the U.S. media in recent whereby the British Army has been losing effective control of many areas of southern Iraq as militant Shiite militias, including the anti-American Mahdi army of Moqtada al-Sadr, steadily gain in power and influence there.

Still it was a better week by a clear measure than most in recent months. And there may well be more where that came from.

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