IRAQ: A huge surge in what has become a daily toll of political killings is ravaging Baghdad with the discovery over the past 24 hours of at least 85 bodies of people shot at close range. Thousands stayed at home yesterday as people feared tit-for-tat killing was going out of control and party leaders failed again to form a new government.
Other residents were afraid of a repetition of three car bombs which devastated street markets in the mainly Shia district known as Sadr City on Sunday, killing 58 people and wounding more than 200.
In the worst incident yesterday, children playing soccer in the Kamaliya district in southeast Baghdad noticed a powerful smell. They alerted police who dug up 29 unidentified bodies from a pit, most of them in their underwear and with gunshot wounds. Some appeared to have been tortured and killed in the past few days, police said, adding they had been gagged and bound.
Earlier, police found 15 people bound and strangled in a minibus on a road between two mainly Sunni districts in western Baghdad. Baghdad hospitals received the bodies of 40 people shot dead in other incidents. They included four men shot in the head and hung from pylons in Sadr City. Muhsin Khudayyir, the editor of an Iraqi weekly, was gunned down near his home in a Sunni part of Baghdad. His killing followed that of two journalists this week.
Shia and Sunni religious leaders continued to call for restraint, but the gunmen were not heeding their pleas. The radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, who has the loyalty of thousands of militiamen in his so-called "Mahdi army", held a rare press conference in Najaf, saying Iraqis did not want civil war.
"I can fight the terrorists. I am able to face them, militarily and spiritually. We are not weak, but we don't want to be dragged to a civil war. So I will keep calling for calm," he said.
He blamed al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia, led by the Jordanian-born militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, for the bombings. He appealed to the Association of Muslim Scholars, the main group of Sunni clerics, to denounce them and other "Takfiris" (the Sunni fundamentalists who claim Shias are heretics).
Mr al-Sadr also accused the US of supporting the bomb attacks in Sadr City. "We all know that . . . this act was carried out under US aerial cover. Spy planes and other kinds of planes were present when the incident took place."
Mr al-Sadr angered the Americans further with a provocative response to remarks made by Donald Rumsfeld last week. The US defence secretary said American troops would let Iraqi security forces deal with any civil war that might break out. "My friend, whether there's a civil war or not, we don't want you to intervene," the cleric said.
The US ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad accused Mr al-Sadr of hypocrisy in taking ministerial jobs in government. He said: "You cannot be a part of the government while at the same time you issue statements demanding that we leave."
President Jalal Talabani again urged political factions "to intensify their efforts to form a government and establish a broad front to achieve security and stability". But party leaders' failure to agree on a government three months after the new parliament was elected is causing anger.
The newspaper Al-Dustur said: "What makes some of our politicians so stunningly stiff and reckless . . . is that they are privileged with dual nationality. do not hesitate to go to terrifying lengths in their bid for power . . . They know they can pack up bag and baggage and flee to safety, leaving behind a country in flames."