Bloodshed Shows no Sign of Abetting
Security forces recover 51 more bodies in Baghdad
Afp, Baghdad
More than 100 bullet-riddled corpses have been recovered from the streets of Baghdad over the past three days, officials said yesterday, amid a sharp spike in sectarian violence in Iraq. Pointing the finger at Shia death squads, Iraq's top Sunni leader Adnan al-Dulaimi said that "well-known militias" were behind the communal bloodletting that he warned was propelling the country towards "disaster." The United Nations has also warned that Iraq could slide into civil war as the daily bloodshed shows no signs of abating despite political efforts for national reconciliation. In the past three days, security forces have collected bodies of more than 100 people killed in Shia-Sunni violence, the epicentre of which is Baghdad. US and Iraqi security officials say most were shot dead execution-style with bullet to their heads and many showed signs of torture. Interior ministry spokesman Brigadier General Abdel Karim Khalaf told AFP that 51 bodies had been recovered in Baghdad in the past 24 hours. He said some of them had been killed in "criminal activities." On Thursday, police reported finding 20 corpses and on Wednesday 64 bodies were registered by the capital's morgues. "A large portion of those are murder, execution-style type activity. It is associated with sectarian violence," US military spokesman Major General William Caldwell told reporters on Thursday. The violence in Baghdad has surged despite a massive security crackdown -- Operation Together Forward -- by US and Iraqi forces since mid-June. Sunni Arab leaders have regularly charged that the sectarian killings are carried out by militias linked to Shia political parties who dominate the parliament. Dulaimi alleged on Thursday that "well known militias" were carrying out the killings, referring to armed groups close to radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr and the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. "If strong measures are not taken soon, the country is going towards disaster and no one would be saved," said Dulaimi, a lawmaker and head of the National Concord Front, Iraq's largest Sunni parliamentary bloc. "These well-known militias are pushing the country to the edge of catastrophe," he said. Iraq's Deputy Prime Minister Barham Saleh also said in Washington on Thursday that militias such as those linked with Sadr will have to disarm, saying situation was "very, very serious challenge for Iraq and for the Iraqi government". After a meeting with US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Saleh, a Kurd, said "there are discussions with Moqtada al-Sadr and other political leaders in the country that they all have to make a choice." "Either they are part of the political process and renounce arms and integrate into the country's political system and governing institutions, or that present situation will not be acceptable," he said. Saleh however accepted that it was politically problematic for Shia Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki to "take on the militias" which come from his own community. The United Nations also warned this week that if urgent steps were not taken, Iraq was heading into all-out civil war. Citing a recent report by UN chief Kofi Annan, UN representative to Iraq, Ashraf Qazi, told the Security Council that "if current patterns of discord and violence prevail for much longer, there is a grave danger of a breakdown of the Iraqi state and potentially civil war." Meanwhile, the US military announced that seven US troops had been killed across Iraq in the past two days. A suicide bomber killed two US soldiers and wounded 25 more on Thursday in a major attack on coalition troops. The bomber detonated his vehicle "next to a hardened structure the guards were guarding" west of Baghdad, the US military said, without elaborating. The military did not specify the exact location of the attack but said the explosion caused debris to be scattered into a concentrated troop area. It had announced Thursday the deaths of three more soldiers in other attacks, and said Friday another two had been killed. In the past few months, the military's losses have jumped across Iraq. Since the start of this month, at least 27 servicemen have died, almost all in rebel attacks. The latest fatalities brought the US military's losses since the March 2003 invasion to 2,677, according to an AFP count based on Pentagon figures.
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