IRAQ: Car bombs killed at least 62 Iraqis yesterday as the prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, prepared for a White House visit expected to focus on halting what many see as Iraq's accelerating slide toward all-out sectarian civil war.
Two separate blasts killed 42 civilians in Sadr City, a sprawling Baghdad slum that is a stronghold of the Shia al-Mahdi army militia.
They came a day after the inaugural meeting of a commission to develop reconciliation strategies for Iraq's rival ethnic and religious factions ended with no obvious result.
Another car bomb exploded in the northern city of Kirkuk, killing at least 20 civilians outside a courthouse, police and witnesses said. Kurds, Arabs and others are contesting control of the city, which sits atop one of the world's great oil lakes.
In east Baghdad, shattered vehicles showed the power of one of the blasts, which killed 34 people. Blood lay in pools. Some witnesses spoke of a suicide bomber driving a minivan. But the Ministry of Defence said it was a car bomb.
The second explosion, a roadside bomb targeting the local council, killed eight people.
"If this is not civil war . . . then I don't know what is," a senior government official said, dismissing complaints from others that the media are exaggerating the dangers of violence in which the United Nations estimates that 100 people are being killed each day and tens of thousands have had to flee their homes.
Saddam Hussein, who is on trial for crimes against humanity and who has been on a hunger strike for 16 days, was fed through a tube yesterday.
The chief prosecutor said the former president would not attend court today. A US military spokesman said he was not in critical condition. "Saddam Hussein continues to maintain his hunger strike and is voluntarily receiving nutrition through a feeding tube. His condition is constantly monitored by medical personnel and is not life-threatening," he said.
Saddam's lawyer accused American military jailers of force-feeding him to break the hunger strike. His trial risks being disrupted. The defence was due to resume its summing-up today and a verdict had been expected about September. But Saddam's lawyers said they will boycott the trial following last month's killing of a defence attorney, the third such death in Baghdad.
The main party from Saddam's once dominant Sunni Arab minority stayed away from the first meeting of the Reconciliation Commission that Mr al-Maliki has called the last chance for peace.
Sunnis, whose community has rebelled for the past three years against US occupation and Shia majority rule, accuse Shia militia death squads of targeting them.
US officials also now say that such sectarian violence is a greater threat than the Sunni insurgency. US and Iraqi troops fought a three-hour gunbattle near a Shia mosque at Mussayab, south of Baghdad, on Saturday, killing 15 militants.
They also engaged in fierce clashes in Sadr City overnight, arresting eight people suspected of "death squad" activities.
A senior member of parliament from the movement of al-Mahdi army leader and cleric Moqtada al-Sadr said yesterday that 14 people killed in the fighting at Mussayab were al-Sadr followers.
Mr Bahaa al-Araji also accused Mr al-Maliki's unity government, to which Mr al-Sadr's group belongs, of giving refuge to Sunni militants and warned of violence if his group's demands were ignored.