Roadside Bombs Kill At Least Four, 20 Bodies Found in Baghdad
08 March 2006
Iraqi police say roadside bombs, including one that hit an Interior Ministry security convoy, have killed at least four people in Baghdad Wednesday.
Security patrols have found the bodies of at least 20 men, most of them in an abandoned vehicle in Amiriyah, a predominantly Sunni Muslim neighborhood of the capital.
Iraqi officials say two of the men appear to have been shot, and most had their hands bound and were blindfolded. They say most of them had been hanged recently.
There is no word on who the victims were, but the grisly discoveries come during a surge in sectarian violence. Hundreds of Iraqis have been killed since last month's bombing of a landmark golden-domed Shi'ite mosque in Samarra.
Elsewhere, the U.S. army announced Wednesday that an American soldier died after a roadside bomb hit a U.S. patrol near the northern town of Tel Afar.
The American military also announced that more than 120 male detainees have been released.
The U.S. military did not give the nationalities of the released detainees.
The U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, says the sectarian attacks could develop into a civil war. He told an American newspaper the toppling of Saddam Hussein's regime in 2003 opened a "Pandora's box" of volatile ethnic and sectarian tensions.
President Bush's Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, said Tuesday he does not believe Iraq is in a state of civil war now, but he acknowledged the potential for such a conflict has always been present.
Meanwhile, Iraqi political parties are continuing work at forming a new government, amid efforts by the main Shi'ite alliance to delay the scheduled opening of Parliament.
President Jalal Talabani has ordered Parliament to convene on Sunday, in order to meet a deadline mandated by the nation's post-Saddam constitution. However, the Shi'ite alliance (the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq) told Mr. Talabani Tuesday the naming of a prime minister could not take place until several days after March 12.
Some information for this report was provided by AP and Reuters.
|
NEWSLETTER
|
| Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list |
|
|
|
