Killers leave trail of bodies around Baghdad

BAGHDAD, Iraq — Authorities found at least 65 bodies dumped throughout Baghdad on Wednesday, and car bombs, mortars and other attacks killed at least three dozen people in an explosion of violence across Baghdad that cast doubt on U.S. claims that the city is on its way to being pacified.

The hands of most of the 65 victims were bound, and they were blindfolded. Most of the dead appeared to have been shot to death, and many showed signs of torture.

The leader of Iraq's biggest Sunni Arab group demanded the Shiite-led government take steps to disarm militias, believed to be behind the execution-style killings that have increased even as U.S. and Iraqi patrols have been sweeping Baghdad neighborhoods in search of insurgents and sectarian militiamen.

The American military, meanwhile, announced the deaths of two soldiers, one killed south of Baghdad on Tuesday night after his vehicle was struck by a bomb, and the other on Monday during combat in Anbar province. As of Wednesday, at least 2,671 members of the U.S. military have died in the Iraq war.

Since security sweeps began on Aug. 7, U.S. officials have boasted that the execution-style killings in Baghdad declined by more than 50 percent in August, compared with July. U.S. officials wouldn't provide specific numbers, however, and have said that their comparison doesn't include victims of car bombings, mortar attacks and other so-called mass-casualty violence.

Statistics released by the Baghdad morgue suggest that the decline in violence from July to August was less than 18 percent, with 1,529 violent deaths in August and 1,855 in July.

Wednesday's deaths, however, clearly fall into the category that the U.S. military is tracking.

The daily total was the highest since the security sweeps began and the second highest so far this year. The most executions — 80 — occurred on Feb. 23, the day after a Shiite mosque was bombed in Samarra, setting off the current round of violence.

The spike in executions may signal that U.S. and Iraqi troops have been unable to quell the activities of death squads as operations begin to slow in anticipation of Ramadan, the month Muslims devote to fasting. Ramadan begins Sept. 24.

The bodies were dumped throughout the city. Ten were found in the Shula neighborhood in western Baghdad and another 10 were found in Sadr City in the east, both Shiite Muslim strongholds of anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. Forty-five of the victims were discovered in predominantly Sunni Arab parts of western Baghdad, including five in the Dora neighborhood, which had already been swept by U.S. and Iraqi forces, police said. Most of the victims were found in groups of four or five.

Shiite Muslim militias have been accused of infiltrating Iraqi police and army units.

An officer from the police station in the Amel neighborhood in north-central Baghdad, speaking on the condition that he not be named, said that many of the incidents appeared to involve day laborers, drivers or police officers who may have been abducted as they began their workdays and then were killed shortly afterward. In most cases, police found no identification on the bodies, which were photographed and taken to the morgue.

Such execution-style killings have become more frequent since the Samarra mosque bombing, although bodies bearing signs of torture have turned up almost daily since 2005.

Other violence in Baghdad on Wednesday targeted police convoys or stations. At least 14 people were killed and 67 wounded after a car bomb and an improvised explosive device went off near Al Shaab Stadium in east Baghdad at around 10 a.m. The blast appeared to be targeting a police convoy.

Two hours later, a bomb in a parked car exploded near a police patrol from the Zayona police station in east Baghdad. Eight police officers were killed and 19 civilians were wounded.

As the violence flared, leaders of the country's main political parties met to seek agreement on a politically explosive plan to carve the country into a federation of three autonomous regions. The federalism plan would create a Shiite region in southern Iraq much like the autonomous zone in the north controlled by the Kurds. Sunnis would be left with vast swaths of desert in the country's middle, which lacks the oil reserves in the other regions.

Objections from Sunni Arabs and an apparent split among Shiites led leaders to delay the debate until Tuesday.

A group of lawmakers tried to take advantage Tuesday of the unpopularity of U.S. troops among many Shiite and Sunni legislators to seek approval of a resolution setting a timetable for the withdrawal of all foreign troops — which the mainstream Shiite-dominated government has so far refused to do.

Sponsored by supporters of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and some Sunni Arabs, the resolution managed to get 104 signatures in the 275-member parliament before it was effectively shelved by being sent to a committee for review.

In Tehran, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki continued his first state visit to Iran by meeting with the country's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who called on the American military to withdraw from Iraq.

"Once the foreign forces leave Iraq, many of its problems will be solved," Khamenei said, according to the official Islamic Republic News Agency.

At the United Nations, Secretary General Kofi Annan said Wednesday that Middle East leaders told him during a recent tour of the region that the U.S. invasion of Iraq has "been a real disaster for them. They believe that it has destabilized the region."

Annan said there were sharp divisions over the virtue of an extended U.S. military presence in Iraq. He said that while regional leaders want American GIs to remain until security improves, Iran pressed for a swift U.S. withdrawal.

"The U.S. has found itself in the position where it cannot stay and it cannot leave," he said.

Additional information from The Washington Post and The Associated Press