BAGHDAD, Sept 14: Police found the bodies of 32 more death squad victims scattered around Baghdad on Thursday, bringing the two-day total to 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 group, said of the death squad murders in a telephone interview.
In one incident, six members of a family, including two women and a three-month-old boy, were shot dead in their home at a school where the father worked as a caretaker.
The baby, Seif, lay wrapped in a blood-soaked 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 said.
US military spokesman Maj Gen 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 U.S. 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.
U.S. 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.
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 leaders.—Reuters
