Nearly 100 bodies found in two days in Baghdad

BAGHDAD - Police found the bodies of 32 more death squad victims scattered around Baghdad today, 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 US 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.

US 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 neighbourhoods 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 US 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 US-led multinational force west of Baghdad today, a military statement said. It did not give details on the attack.

It did not give the nationalities of the soldiers.

US 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.

US 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 US 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.

The escalating violence has piled political pressure on US President George W 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 US 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 Defence 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 US troops toppled Saddam Hussein.

The Sunni speaker of parliament said party leaders were considering proposing a timetable for US withdrawal, something that Washington is uncomfortable in defining. However, it is not clear what support such a proposal would have.

- REUTERS