Police find 60 bodies in Baghdad

BAGHDAD - Iraqi police found 60 bodies dumped across Baghdad in the 24 hours until Tuesday morning, the apparent victims of sectarian death squads blamed for escalating violence that threatens to pitch the country into civil war.

A bomb placed under a car outside a bakery in the mostly Sunni southern Baghdad district of Doura exploded at midday, reducing the shop to rubble and killing 10 people, many who had been queuing outside to buy bread, police said.

Iraq has been gripped by Sunni-Shi'ite bloodletting since the bombing of a revered Shi'ite shrine in February. The United Nations estimates 100 Iraqis die violently every day.

In the most high-profile killing in recent weeks, gunmen in camouflage uniform on Monday shot dead the brother of Iraq's Sunni vice president, Tareq al-Hashemi. He was the third of Hashemi's siblings to be killed since April.

The violence continues largely unchecked despite US efforts to build up Iraq's fledgling security forces, a major security crackdown in the capital and a series of peace plans by Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's four-month-old government.

Most of the 60 bodies, victims of the deaths squads who roam Baghdad torturing and killing at will, had been shot in the head execution-style, an Interior Ministry official told Reuters.

Some of the victims, all men, had been blindfolded or bound, said the official, who did not want to be named. Some had severe bruising, often a sign of beating, or broken limbs.

US officials had predicted a surge in violence during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which began in late September.

Maliki's government is under growing pressure, particularly from Washington, to rein in the militias, several of which are tied to parties within his own government and are accused of infiltrating the police to provide cover for killings.

Joint checkpoints

In a bid to ease the violence and bridge mistrust, Maliki has announced a plan to form committees in Baghdad districts that would include representatives of political parties, religious leaders and military and police officials.

An all-party committee overseeing the plan will discuss proposals on Tuesday night for joint police and military checkpoints in Sunni and Shi'ite districts, a senior government official told Reuters. He dismissed one proposal being floated -- joint Sunni-Shi'ite checkpoints -- as unworkable.

US and Iraqi forces have been sweeping through Baghdad neighborhoods where the violence is worst and they are also battling for control of other towns and cities in Iraq.

The US military said it killed seven insurgents in an airstrike on a building in Ramadi after US troops came under "extremely heavy fire". Ramadi is the capital of Anbar province, where the Sunni insurgency accounts for most of the US deaths.

In the flashpoint southern Shi'ite city of Diwaniya, US and Iraqi troops killed 11 militants, many dressed as Iraqi police, in clashes around a mosque on Monday night, the US military said.

It said the fighting erupted after militants opened fire on a joint U.S.-Iraqi patrol. But a senior representative of radical Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr said the troops had been trying to arrest him.

"They shot at us. One of my guards has two or three grenades and the other has a machinegun. They returned fire and set fire to one of the Humvees. We then withdrew peacefully, thank God," Khudair al-Ansari told Reuters.

The fighting follows fierce street battles in the city at the weekend. The US military said 30 militants were killed when US and Iraqi troops raided Diwaniya on Sunday to detain a suspect accused of involvement in the summary execution of 13 Iraqi soldiers in the city in August.

- REUTERS