BAGHDAD, Sept 16: Iraqi police found the bodies of 47 more death squad victims in Baghdad on Saturday, the latest in a wave of sectarian killings which prompted the United States to divert troops from other parts of Iraq to the embattled capital.
Most victims had been bound, tortured and shot, bringing the toll from such killings to nearly 180 in four days.
The United States has shifted its emphasis to the capital in recent months, after concluding that sectarian violence was a greater threat than the guerillas it has fought mainly in the west and north.
The US military confirmed Iraqi plans, announced earlier this week, to restrict access to Baghdad by forcing cars through 28 checkpoints, but denied some western media reports that the plan involves digging a giant 100-km trench around the city.
Washington has acknowledged a ‘spike’ in execution-style sectarian killings in the capital this week, but said violence has been reduced in the scattered neighbourhoods it has targeted in ‘Operation Together Forward’, a month-long security crackdown.
A suicide car bomber killed one civilian and wounded 22 outside a well-fortified police station in southern Baghdad. Also in the capital, two Iraqi soldiers were killed by a bomb when they came to recover a corpse from a booby-trapped car.
“Baghdad is our main effort right now,” Lt Gen Peter Chiarelli, the top US operational commander in Iraq, told Pentagon reporters in a briefing from Iraq on Friday.
He said some troops were being drawn down from Anbar province, the vast western desert heartland of the resistance, to be sent to the capital.
The tactic has caused controversy after a classified US Marine analysis leaked this week described the Al Qaeda as the province’s dominant political force and concluded Washington could defeat them only with more troops.
ACCESS CONTROLLED: Iraq’s interior ministry announced earlier this week that it would set up checkpoints at 28 access points and close all other roads into Baghdad as part of its clampdown.
Some western media have quoted an interior ministry official as saying that the plan would involve digging a giant trench around Baghdad, an unlikely engineering feat in a city of seven million people.
But on Saturday the official, Brig Abdul-Karim Khalaf, told reporters the trench was ‘an idea among many others, and still under discussion. It could be adopted or not’.
President George Bush has also spoken of building a ‘berm’ — an earth wall — around Baghdad, a tactic used around some Iraqi towns, but none anywhere near as large as Baghdad.
“There’s a series of obstacles that the Iraqi government are planning, and we’re working with them, to ensure movement through checkpoints, to keep terrorists and extremists and criminals from using those (other) routes,” US military spokesman Lt Col Barry Johnson said.
“No doubt there will be some trenches involved in this, but to say there is going to be a moat around the city is a bit of a stretch,” he said. “So it’s not a trench. It will be a series using the natural terrain that already exists such as canals.”
Baghdad is 100 kilometres in circumference and surrounded mostly by farmland. The land is crisscrossed by irrigation canals and mostly impassable for cars driving off roads. —Reuters
