In the past 24 hours, police have found the bodies of at least 85 men killed by gunfire execution-style in a gruesome wave of apparent sectarian killing, the interior ministry said on Tuesday.
They include at least 27 bodies stacked in a mass grave in an eastern Shi’ite neighbourhood.
Much of the bloodshed — the second wave of mass killings in Iraq since bombers destroyed an important Shi’ite shrine last month — followed deadly weekend explosions in a teeming Shi’ite slum in which 58 people died and more than 200 were wounded.
Iraq’s interior ministry announced a ban on driving in Baghdad to coincide with the first meeting of Iraq’s new Parliament on Thursday. The ban takes effect at 8pm on Wednesday and lasts until 4pm on Thursday.
Squabbling over the composition of a new government has delayed the inaugural session since the results of December 15 parliamentary elections were confirmed more than a month ago.
Leaders of Iraq’s main ethnic and religious blocs began a series of marathon meetings on Tuesday in an attempt to break the deadlock.
United States ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, who has been shuttling between the main factions, joined the session hosted by Shi’ite leader Adbul-Aziz al-Hakim.
The stakes are high for the US, which hopes a strong and inclusive central government can stabilise the country so its forces can start drawing down in the summer.
Corpses
Most of the discarded corpses were found in the capital and three in the northern city of Mosul, police said.
Acting on an anonymous tip, police found a 6m-by-8m hole in a empty field. It contained at least 27 dead men — most of them in their underwear — in Kamaliyah, a mostly Shi’ite east Baghdad suburb, said interior ministry official Lieutenant Colonel Falah al-Mohammedawi. He estimated they had been killed about three days ago.
Local residents offered scarves to help cover the bodies, which were laid out on the ground. Police guarded the site as members of a Shi’ite militia dug for more corpses. An Associated Press photographer took pictures of the grave, but was warned not to publish them.
An abandoned minibus containing 15 more bodies was found earlier on the main road between two mostly Sunni west Baghdad neighbourhoods — not far from where another minibus containing 18 bodies was discovered last week, said al-Mohammedawi.
At least 40 more bodies were recovered in Baghdad, including both Sunni and Shi’ite neighbourhoods, said al-Mohammedawi.
They included four men shot in the head execution-style and hanged from electricity pylons in Sadr City, where two car bombs and four mortar rounds shattered shops and market stalls at nightfall on Sunday, as residents shopped for food for their evening meals.
Scores of frightened Shi’ite families have fled predominantly Sunni parts of Baghdad in recent weeks, some of them at gunpoint.
More than 100 families arrived between Monday and Tuesday alone in Wasit province, in the southern Shi’ite heartland, said Haitham Ajaimi Manie, an official with the provisional migration directorate. More than 300 Baghdad families are now sheltering in the province, he said.
Government
The violence since the February 22 bombing of the famed golden dome atop the Shi’ite Askariya shrine in Samarra has complicated negotiations for Iraq’s first permanent, post-invasion government.
A caretaker government has been in charge since the December elections, and US and Iraqi officials fear the vacuum in authority is fuelling the bloodshed.
Under pressure from the US ambassador, leaders of the main ethnic and religious groups agreed on Sunday to meet daily until they can unblock the political negotiations.
Among the most contentious issues is Shi’ite Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari’s candidacy for a second term. Kurdish, Sunni and some secular leaders argue he is too divisive a figure and accuse him of doing too little to contain reprisal attacks on Sunni mosques and clerics after the Shi’ite shrine was destroyed.
The Shi’ite United Iraqi Alliance is itself divided over al-Jaafari. He won the nomination by just one vote last month in large part because of the support of radical Shi’ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. Al-Hakim favoured Adil Abdul-Mahdi, one of two current vice-presidents.
Also present at Tuesday’s meeting were President Jalal Talabani and Massoud Barzani, leaders of the main Kurdish parties; Dhafir al-Ani, an official with the main Sunni bloc; and former prime minister Ayad Allawi, a secular Shi’ite.
A scorched pavement, destroyed shops, burned-out cars and the dangling bodies awaited Shi’ite residents emerging from their homes on Monday in Sadr City.
The scene, although gruesome, was not what many had feared: that the deadly explosions the previous night would ignite all-out civil war.
Radical Shi’ite cleric al-Sadr — whose stronghold was targeted on Sunday — refused to be provoked. With thousands of his Mehdi Army militiamen ready to fight, the anti-American leader called for calm and national unity.
‘Cowardly act’
Sunni religious leaders quickly condemned the assault on Sadr City.
Sheik Ahmed Abdul Ghafour al-Samaraie, head of the Sunni Endowment, the state agency responsible for Sunni mosques and shrines, called it ”a cowardly and criminal act”.
”There are some hands trying to add fuel to the fire for their own benefit,” he said on television.
Britain, the US’s largest military partner in Iraq, showed its confidence on Monday by announcing a 10% — about 800-troop — reduction by May.
”This is a significant reduction which is based largely on the ability of the Iraqis themselves to participate and defend themselves against terrorism, but there is a long, long way to go,” British Defence Secretary John Reid said in London.
Bomb blasts and shootings in Baghdad and north of the capital, many of them targeting Iraqi police patrols, killed at least 15 more people on Monday and wounded more than 40. They included a US soldier who died in a roadside bombing, the military said. A US marine was reported killed on Sunday in insurgent-plagued Anbar province.
In Washington, US President George Bush said insurgents are trying to ignite a civil war by escalating the violence.
”I wish I could tell you that the violence is waning and that the road ahead will be smooth,” Bush said in a speech at the Foundation for Defence of Democracies at George Washington University. ”It will not. There will be more tough fighting and more days of struggle, and we will see more images of chaos and carnage in the days and months to come.” — Sapa-AP
Associated Press writers Sameer N Yacoub and Qassim Abdul-Zahra contributed to this report from Baghdad