Reuters
Wednesday, October 11, 2006

BAGHDAD, Oct. 10 -- Iraqi police found 50 bodies dumped across Baghdad on Tuesday, apparent victims of sectarian death squads, and a bombing at a bakery in the capital killed 10 people in the biggest single attack of the day.

The discovery of the bodies, many tortured and all shot, brought to at least 110 the number found in Baghdad in the past two days, an Interior Ministry official said.

A bomb placed under a car outside a bakery in the mostly Sunni Arab southern Baghdad district of Dora reduced the shop to rubble and killed 10 people, many who had been in line outside to buy bread, police said.

At least 25 others were killed in bombings and shootings around Iraq, police and Interior Ministry officials said.

Iraq has been gripped by Sunni-Shiite bloodletting since the bombing of a Shiite Muslim shrine in February. The United Nations estimates that 100 Iraqis die violently every day.

The violence rages on largely unchecked despite U.S. efforts to build up Iraq's fledgling security forces, a major security crackdown in the capital and a series of peace plans by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's four-month-old government.

Dozens of explosions rocked the capital for several hours on Tuesday night, alarming residents more used to sporadic mortar and rocket attacks, but the U.S. military said the cause was a fire at an ammunition dump at a U.S. base in southern Baghdad.

"The fire ignited tank and artillery ordnance as well as small arms ammunition," the military said in a statement.

A U.S. military spokesman, Lt. Col. Christopher C. Garver, said the cause of the fire, which lit up the night sky, was under investigation.

The Islamic Army in Iraq, one of a number of militant groups, asserted that it had attacked the base with rocket and mortar fire.

There were no immediate reports of casualties. A spokesman for the 4th Infantry Division said the base had been safely evacuated.

Three U.S. Marines were killed in action in Anbar province in western Iraq on Monday, the U.S. military said. Anbar is a center of the Sunni insurgency against Maliki's Shiite-led government and U.S. forces. The deaths brought to at least 37 the number of U.S. troops killed in Iraq since the start of October.

The U.S. military said Tuesday that seven insurgents were killed in an airstrike on a building in Ramadi, the capital of Anbar, after U.S. troops came under "extremely heavy fire."

U.S. officials had predicted a surge in violence during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which began in late September.

Maliki's government is under growing pressure, particularly from Washington, to rein in sectarian militias, several of which are tied to parties within his government and are accused of infiltrating the police to provide cover for killings.

Most of the victims found dumped in Baghdad's streets had been shot in the head execution-style and bore signs of torture, typical features of sectarian death squad killings that the Interior Ministry says claim about 50 lives a day. A ministry official had earlier reported the discovery of 60 bodies in the 24 hours leading up to Tuesday morning, but a further 50 were found during the day, officials said.

In the flash point southern Shiite city of Diwaniyah, U.S. and Iraqi troops killed at least nine guerrillas, most dressed as Iraqi police, in clashes around a mosque on Monday night, the U.S. military said.

It said the fighting erupted after a U.S.-Iraqi patrol was fired upon. But Khudair al-Ansari, a senior representative of radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, said the troops had been trying to arrest him.

"They shot at us," Ansari said. "One of my guards has two or three grenades and the other has a machine gun. They returned fire and set fire to one of the Humvees. We then withdrew peacefully, thank God."

The fighting follows recent street battles in Diwaniyah.

The U.S. military said 30 militants were killed and an American tank was severely damaged when U.S. and Iraqi troops entered Diwaniyah on Sunday to detain a "high-value target."