Reuters : Baghdad death squads kill 60

Baghdad death squads kill 60

by Alastair Macdonald | September 13, 2006

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Police recovered 60 bodies over the past day across Baghdad, most bound and tortured, officials said on Wednesday, highlighting how sectarian death squads are still plaguing the Iraqi capital despite a major security drive.

At the morning rush hour, a car bomb targeting police killed 14 people outside the Baghdad traffic police headquarters near the national stadium. A further 57 people were wounded.

A small bomb detonated by roadside, drawing attention from police who were then struck by the bigger car bomb blast.

The death of another U.S. soldier was confirmed in Anbar province, where the commander denied suggestions his force had lost control to al Qaeda and other Sunni insurgents but said stabilising the western desert region would be a job for Iraqi politicians and their growing, U.S.-trained troops and police.

U.S. and Iraqi leaders say that the biggest threat to Iraq no longer comes from the three-year-old revolt among ousted president Saddam Hussein's fellow Sunni Muslims but from conflict between Sunnis and the Shi'ite majority now in power.

Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki was in Iran for a second day of meetings. His fellow Shi'ite Islamist leaders pledged support for Iraq and efforts to avert civil war, drawing a wary response from Washington which accused Tehran of funding militants there.

An Interior Ministry official and sources at Baghdad police headquarters said a total of 60 unidentified bodies were found in various parts of Baghdad over the past day.

The unusually high daily tally, recorded despite a month-old security crackdown by reinforced U.S. and Iraqi troops, comprised 45 in west Baghdad and 15 east of the Tigris river.

Most were bound and shot in the head and many bore signs of torture, the source said -- trademarks of sectarian death squads and kidnap gangs plaguing the Iraqi capital.

DAILY TOLL

The United Nations estimated two months ago that about 100 people a day were being killed in a covert sectarian dirty war.

U.S. military commanders have said the increased presence of troops on the street, sweeping through violent neighbourhoods to prepare them for Iraqi police control, had reduced the "murder rate" by more than 40 percent in August. That figure included individual shootings but not bigger attacks such as bombings.

Last week, the U.N. office in Baghdad said the number of unidentified bodies taken to the city morgue in August fell by about 17 percent from the record month of July to 1,536. Morgue officials, who have stopped giving data to the media, say that about 90 percent of the bodies they see are victims of violence.

The Health Ministry has yet to publish its complementary full data for other violent deaths in August. Figures for July put the total at more than 3,000 people, concentrated in Baghdad, where more than one in four Iraqis live.

The killings have made tens of thousands flee areas where they are in a minority and hardening a divide along the Tigris between mainly Sunni west Baghdad and the mainly Shi'ite east.

Maliki's four-month-old unity government is pursuing a "national reconciliation plan" to avert all-out civil war but major strains are clear between rival factions, notably over how far the oil-rich Shi'ite south can have autonomy from Baghdad.

Maliki was due to meet Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei on Wednesday on his first official visit to Iran, which Saddam's Iraq fought a bloody eight-year war through the 1980s.

Saddam's trial for genocide against the Kurds in 1988 continued in Baghdad with the prosecution, in an unusual move, asking the judge to resign for being too lenient in letting the defendants make speeches and intimidating comments to witnesses.

The judge refused.

(Additional reporting by Mussab Al-Khairalla, Aseel Kami and Ibon Villelabeitia)

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