posted September 14, 2006 04:34 PM              

By Peter Graff
1 hour, 9 minutes ago

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 neighborhoods the military has targeted 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.

A suicide car bomber killed two soldiers and wounded 25 from the U.S.-led multinational force west of Baghdad on Thursday, a military statement said. It did not give details on the attack.

It did not give the nationalities of the soldiers.

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 soccer 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 President 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 Defense 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)

posted September 20, 2006 11:37 PM              

20 Sep 2006 17:00:10 GMT
Source: Reuters

By Peter Graff

BAGHDAD, Sept 20 (Reuters) - Hundreds more Iraqis died in violence in July and August than in the previous two months, many of them tortured to death because of their religion with cables, acid and power drills, a U.N. report said on Wednesday.

The July total of 3,590 deaths was unprecedented, it said, while the August figure of 3,009, though lower, was also among the worst yet.

In its previous report two months ago, it gave a combined figure of 5,818 for the two months of May and June. The latest two-month figure shows an increase of more than 13 percent over that number, which it described as a sharp surge at the time.

"Hundreds of bodies have continued to appear throughout the country bearing signs of severe torture and execution-style killing," it said in a statement announcing its latest report.

"Terrorist attacks, the growth of militias, the emergence of organised crime reflects a lack of centralised and authorised control over the use of force in the country, which results in indiscriminate killings of civilians," it said.

Sunnis and Shi'ites were kidnapped by rival militia and tortured for information about their sect, it said.

"Detainees' bodies show signs of beating using electrical cables, wounds in different parts of their bodies, including in the head and genitals, broken bones of legs and hands, electric and cigarette burns," it said.

"Bodies found at the Medico-legal Institute often bear signs of severe torture including acid-induced injuries and burns caused by chemical substances, missing skin, broken bones, missing eyes, missing teeth and wounds caused by power drills or nails."

SURGE IN BODIES FOUND

Finding reliable data about deaths in Iraq is difficult. The United Nations obtains its figure from morgues and the Iraqi Health Ministry. Morgues no longer provide independent information to the media.

The U.N. report gave no breakdown for the kind of attacks that led to the deaths.

The U.S. military has said its own figure for the "murder rate" in Baghdad halved in August, but Washington has not explained how it arrived at the figure, which it says does not include deaths in bombings and mass attacks.

Violence in Iraq worsened sharply this year after an attack on a Shi'ite shrine in February triggered *** -for-tat sectarian killings.

Washington says a decrease in killings in August was a result of a crackdown it launched in scattered neighbourhoods in Baghdad, part of a new strategy unveiled in July to focus the effort of its 147,000-strong force on the capital.

So far, the figures for September look likely to rise.

Last week saw a surge in the number of bodies of tortured and bound victims found dumped on the streets of Baghdad. U.S. commanders acknowledge that the overall level of violence in the city has risen even if it has fallen in areas they target.

The past four days have seen a number of large-scale bombings that killed scores in cities in the northern and western sectors where U.S. troops have been drawn down to reinforce the capital.

And U.S. commanders say they expect a surge in violence with the start of the Ramadan holiday next week.

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