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Security Ring for Baghdad Underway
An Iraqi soldier patrols on a largely deserted street in Baghdad, where vehicles were banned for Friday prayer day.
(By Hadi Mizban -- Associated Press)
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The Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which begins in October, is likely to increase the flow of people in and out of Baghdad. The Iraqi government, Johnson said, is trying to determine how the plan to seal Baghdad will affect the flow of vehicles in a city already clogged with heavy traffic.
The grisly discoveries of more bodies around the capital illustrated how serious the ongoing sectarian strife has become. According to Iraqi police officials, some of the corpses had disfigured faces. Most were shot in the head. All bore marks of torture. Some were found near a railroad track, others near a bus station. Five were beheaded. All were young men, in civilian clothes, between the ages of 20 and 35.
The bodies were dumped in both Shiite Muslim and Sunni Muslim neighborhoods, east, west and south of the Tigris River, which weaves through the heart of the city. In total, 114 bullet-riddled and tortured corpses have turned up since Tuesday.
Meanwhile, on Friday, five U.S. soldiers were reported killed. Military officials said they included two who were killed Thursday in a suicide bombing that also wounded 30 Americans west of Baghdad. Another American soldier died in combat in Anbar province on Friday, and two more were killed by roadside bombs -- one on Thursday in northwest Baghdad, the other in south Baghdad on Friday.
In the northern city of Mosul, a car bomb that targeted a U.S. patrol killed nine civilians, said Brig. Gen. Saed Jubury, a police spokesman.
In the political arena, a revered Shiite cleric indicated that he would not support a proposal to create a controversial autonomous Shiite region that many Sunnis and some Shiites fear could partition Iraq.
After a meeting with senior Shiite leaders, Ayatollah Mohammad Yaqoubi's office released a statement saying that Yaqoubi stressed "the maintenance of Iraq's unity and expressed his upset over the discord among the political parties and their preference for their factious interests over the public interests of the people."
The statement delivered another blow to efforts by Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, leader of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, to pass a draft bill that would carve Iraq into a three-part federal system, including a separate Shiite region.
Sunni Arab political parties have accused their Shiite counterparts of trying to break apart Iraq and have threatened to boycott parliament. Both the Kurdish-populated north and the Shiite south are oil-rich, while most Sunni Arabs live around Baghdad or in Iraq's resource-poor western provinces.
Correspondent Ellen Knickmeyer in Baghdad, staff writer Thomas E. Ricks in Washington, special correspondent Saad Sarhan in Najaf and other Washington Post staff contributed to this report.
