Nearly 100 bodies found in two days in Baghdad
Pastor Dale Morgan
Friday September 15, 2:14 AM Reuters
*Nearly 100 bodies found in two days in Baghdad*
By Peter Graff
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Police found the bodies of 32 more death squad
victims scattered around Baghdad on Thursday, bringing the two-day total
to nearly 100, and a Sunni leader said the slayings could destroy the
political process.
Bodies of victims bound, tortured and shot have been found in Baghdad
for months. But the U.S. military acknowledged the last 48 hours had
seen a surge in such execution-style sectarian killings despite a push
to bring order to the capital.
"If these barbarian acts do not stop, certainly it will affect the
reconciliation plan," Adnan al-Dulaimi, leader of the Iraqi Accordance
Front, parliament's biggest Sunni Arab group, said of the death squad
murders in a telephone interview.
In one incident, six members of a Shi'ite family, including two women
and a 3-month-old boy, were shot dead in their home at a school where
the father worked as a caretaker in a mainly Sunni district of west Baghdad.
The baby, Seif, lay wrapped in a bloodsoaked towel at a nearby hospital
morgue, a bullet hole in the back of his neck.
"Gunmen started firing at me and I escaped. But they entered the home
and killed my brother. They then dragged out my young son on the floor,"
his weeping father Ahmed told Reuters.
U.S. military spokesman Major General William Caldwell said: "There was
a spike in violence that did occur in the last 24 hours, and a large
part of those were of murder-executions."
But he insisted the situation was improving in neighbourhoods the
military has targetted as part of its month-old Operation Together
Forward, with reinforcements sent to the capital to restore order.
"We have seen a sustained reduction in the level of violence and murders
in the focus areas. However, in Baghdad at large, the number of
executions, we have seen it creeping back up."
The U.S. military reported three of its soldiers killed, including one
from the newly arrived task force led by the 25th Infantry Division,
which took over northern Iraq this week.
U.S. and Iraqi officials also said they had killed one and captured
another senior figure from al Qaeda's Iraq branch.
Apart from the mounting toll of execution-style murders, some of them
sectarian, some probably the work of kidnap gangs, Thursday saw a number
of bombings that have become routine.
In Baghdad, a car bomb struck a police patrol outside an orphanage,
killing nine people and wounding 26. In Falluja, a car bomb killed five
people near a football field and in Tal Afar a suicide bomber strapped
with explosives killed a policeman.
U.S. and Iraqi troops raided a local office for followers of Shi'ite
cleric Moqtada al-Sadr in Diwaniya. Two men were killed and nine hurt in
subsequent unrest. A curfew was imposed in the Shi'ite city, where U.S.
troops have been sent in after 20 Iraqi soldiers died in clashes with
Sadr's militiamen two weeks ago.
An Iraqi deputy prime minister said in Washington that the government
would introduce a law on disbanding militias like Sadr's Mehdi Army but
acknowledged it would need the cooperation of Sadr and other political
leaders if it was to work.
POLITICAL PRESSURE
The escalating violence has piled political pressure on U.S. President
George W. Bush, facing congressional elections in November. Bush has
said in a series of speeches that success in Iraq is key to a global
struggle against Islamic militants.
The White House came under fire after newspapers reported this week that
a classified military assessment said al Qaeda was now the dominant
political force in Iraq's biggest province Anbar, where the government
and U.S. Marines hold little sway.
Iraq's Interior Ministry said its forces in Baghdad killed the number
two Qaeda figure in Iraq, naming him as Abu Jaafar al-Liby. The Defence
Ministry said troops arrested another man, Thamer Mohsen al-Jibouri,
calling him the fourth-ranked leader.
Key to Washington's plan to withdraw is establishing a government that
would draw in minority Sunnis, who rose up after being driven from power
when U.S. troops toppled Saddam Hussein.
The Sunni speaker of parliament said party leaders were considering
proposing a timetable for U.S. withdrawal, something that Washington is
uncomfortable in defining. However, it is not clear what support such a
proposal would have.
(Additional reporting by Aseel Kami and Mussab al-Khairalla)