IRAQ: Police recovered 60 bodies over the past day across Baghdad, most bound and tortured, officials said yesterday, highlighting how sectarian death squads are still plaguing the Iraqi capital despite a major security drive.
Two car bombs targeting police killed 22 people in the morning and wounded another 76 people. The first killed 14 outside Baghdad's traffic police headquarters, a second targeted guards at an electricity station in the east of the city.
At the White House, where president George Bush has been defending his invasion of Iraq ahead of congressional elections, a spokeswoman said: "The violence is horrible . . . We are working closely with the Iraqi government in order to turn the tide."
Parliamentary leaders met and failed to break deadlock over the issue of "federalism"- Shias want sweeping autonomy for their oil-rich southern provinces to match that of ethnic Kurds in the north. Sunnis want the constitution amended to strengthen the Baghdad government. Some fear civil war could result.
Meanwhile prime minister Nuri al-Maliki met Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in Tehran yesterday.
Ayatollah Khamenei called on the 145,000 US troops to leave immediately: "Most problems in Iraq will be removed with the departure of the occupiers," state media quoted him as saying.
Mr Maliki, too, says he wants the Americans gone, but not until Iraqi forces are capable of handling the violence they face.
An Interior Ministry official and sources at Baghdad police headquarters said a total of 60 unidentified bodies were found, freshly killed, in various parts of Baghdad over the past day.
Four others, one a woman, were fished out of the Tigris river just south of the capital - another daily occurrence. The tally was among the highest of late, despite a month-old security crackdown by reinforced US and Iraqi troops.
"But we've had worse days," the Interior Ministry official said. "Sometimes we sent 65 or even 100 to the morgue." Fifteen bodies were found scattered, some in roadside garbage heaps, close to the Shia militia stronghold of Sadr City in eastern Baghdad, he said. In the southern district of Saidiya, the bloodied remains of five bakers were discovered. Most of the dead were bound and shot in the head and many bore signs of torture, the official said - marks of sectarian death squads as well as of criminal kidnap gangs.
The UN estimated two months ago that about 100 people a day were being killed in a covert sectarian dirty war.
US commanders say more troops on the streets, sweeping through violent neighbourhoods, reduced the "murder rate" by more than 40 per cent in August. That figure included individual shootings but not bigger attacks such as bombings.
Last week, the UN office in Baghdad said the number of unidentified bodies taken to the city morgue in August fell by about 17 per cent from the record month of July to 1,536. - (Reuters)