McCain, Feingold Air Views in Iraq

A physician at Ramadi's hospital said he kept Mihallawi's body in a morgue refrigerator until his family could recover it discreetly. The Post is withholding the physician's name for security reasons.

A spokesman for the U.S. Marines in Anbar province, of which Ramadi is the capital, said he had no information on the attack. A spokesman for al-Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Maysara al-Iraqi, acknowledged that the group had killed Mihallawi but denied he was beheaded and said he was killed outside the school. He asked reporters not to publicize the incident, calling it "an internal affair."

In Baghdad on Saturday, a mortar shell struck a home in the restive neighborhood of Dora, killing two people and wounding six, according to police Capt. Raad al-Timmimi.

Elsewhere in Iraq, police officers south of Baghdad found the bodies of at least 10 people shot to death with their hands bound. East of Baghdad, four people were killed and two wounded when a roadside bomb tore through their vehicle. And in the town of Mahmudiyah, police said Sunni insurgents fought for several hours with members of a Shiite militia loyal to influential cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, leading to the detention of several insurgents.

With sectarian violence surging across the country since the bombing last month of a Shiite shrine in Samarra, north of Baghdad, each member of the U.S. delegation visiting Baghdad stressed the urgency of forming a new government. McCain pointed to a dearth of economic development but said he had been encouraged by reports of improvements in Iraq's security forces and a burgeoning rift between Iraqi and foreign insurgents. "The statistics that I see is that slow and steady progress is being made," the Arizona senator said.

Feingold, who recently called for the Senate to censure President Bush over a domestic surveillance program run by the National Security Agency, said he was dismayed not to hear any of the military commanders he met with mention al-Qaeda as a source of the problems in Iraq. The Bush administration and U.S. officials here often point to the radical group as a major source of instability in the country.

"There seems to be a disconnect between the rhetoric in Washington about what this is all about and what we hear here," Feingold said. McCain responded that he did "not want to get into a back-and-forth with one of my best friends."

"Russ could have been a lot more outspoken," said Rep. Tom Udall (D-N.M.), who was part of the visiting delegation. "There's always been with foreign policy an idea that debate stops at the shores. . . . At times today it didn't."

Special correspondents Naseer Nouri, Omar Fekeiki and Saad al-Izzi in Baghdad and Saad Sarhan in Najaf contributed to this report.