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50 Bodies Found in Baghdad    [

    UN Secretary Says Iraq Is Engulfed in Deadly Civil War
    By Edward Wong
    The New York Times

    Sunday 03 December 2006

    Baghdad - Kofi Annan, the United Nations secretary general, said Sunday that Iraq had descended into a civil war that was even deadlier and more anarchic than the 15-year sectarian bloodshed that tore apart Lebanon.

    "When we had the strife in Lebanon and other places, we called that a civil war; this is much worse," Mr. Annan said in an interview with the BBC.

    In making his remarks, Mr. Annan joined a growing number of foreign and Iraqi leaders, policy makers and news organizations who say that Iraq is in the grip of civil war. Former Secretary of State Colin Powell said last Wednesday at a conference in the United Arab Emirates that Iraq is in a civil war. A former Iraqi prime minister, Ayad Allawi, said the same last March.

    The Bush administration has not characterized the conflict as a civil war.

    The debate over the term raged last week in the United States, after NBC and other major news organizations said they were ready to apply it to Iraq. Scholars say that the widening sectarian conflict meets the common scholarly definition of a civil war and that when measured by deaths per year, Iraq is among the top civil wars of the last half-century. The civilian death toll is believed to be at least 50,000.

    Last week, Mr. Annan suggested holding an international conference on Iraq that would include all of the country's major political groups and representatives from around the region.

    In Baghdad on Sunday, President Jalal Talabani rejected a call by Mr. Annan for an international conference to reach a solution to the conflict, saying the Iraqis were working to stanch the bloodshed through their own political process.

    "We have an ongoing political process and a council of representatives that is the best in the region," Mr. Talabani said in a statement, using the formal name of the Iraqi Parliament. "We became an independent sovereign state and we decide the issues of the country."

    In addition to Mr. Annan, a growing number of American advisers have suggested that the United States and Iraq should hold a conference that would bring together all the countries in the region to try to re-establish stability in Iraq. Such a meeting might include Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia, all accused by various American and Iraqi leaders of fomenting violence here.

    The bipartisan Iraq Study Group headed by former Secretary of State James A. Baker III is expected to recommend in a report this week that the United States open up diplomatic channels with Iran and Syria to discuss the subject. That suggestion has already been received coolly by the White House, where some senior officials say opening talks with those two countries would in itself be a major concession to their authoritarian, anti-American governments.

    On Saturday, a powerful Shiite leader, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, also rejected Mr. Annan's call for a conference. In the past, Mr. Hakim has chafed at the idea that countries in the region dominated by Sunni Arabs could get more involved in Iraq. Mr. Hakim comes from a prominent religious family and has close ties to Iran, which is largely Shiite.

    Mr. Hakim is scheduled to meet with President Bush in Washington on Monday to discuss the rapid deterioration of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki's government.

    Mr. Talabani's office released his statement after he met with Representative Christopher Shays, the Connecticut Republican who is advocating a timetable for withdrawing American troops. Mr. Shays is also pushing to convene a conference of Iraq's neighbors.

    In his statement, Mr. Talabani also said that it was not the government's top priority to disband militias, and that it was more important to tamp down on the Sunni Arab-led insurgency. The United States has pressed the government to disband militias, including two major Shiite militia groups.

    The American military said Sunday that American forces killed two women, one child and six insurgents on Saturday in assaults on two buildings in the town of Garma, in the hostile Anbar Province. The women and child were killed, along with five insurgents, in an airstrike on one house, the military said.

    The American military announced eight deaths of service members on Sunday. Two soldiers were killed by a roadside bomb while on patrol in Anbar on Saturday, and three Marines died the same day in Anbar from combat wounds. Another soldier was killed Saturday by a roadside bomb near Taji. A soldier died in combat in Baghdad on Sunday. The Air Force said Maj. Troy L. Gilbert, a pilot listed as missing after his F-16 crashed last Monday in Anbar, had been killed in the incident.

    In Baghdad, the police found at least 50 bodies across the city. The body of Hideab Majhool Hasnawi, the head of a famous soccer club, was identified in the morgue. A leader of the Mandean religion, Talib Salman Areebie, was kidnapped from his home in the Ur neighborhood and killed soon afterward, said a spokesman for the Mandeans.

    A car bomb killed 3 civilians and injured 10 in northern Baghdad, an Interior Ministry official said. In the city of Mosul, a suicide car bomber rammed into a police station, killing two policemen and wounding four others.

    West of Basra, British soldiers fought Shiite militiamen as the British tried searching buildings in the town of Hayaniya, a stronghold of the Mahdi Army, the militia loyal to the anti-American cleric Moktada al-Sadr. A police official said that at least one Shiite fighter was killed.

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    Khalid al-Ansary contributed reporting from Baghdad, and Iraqi employees of The New York Times contributed from Falluja, Mosul and Basra.

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    50 Bodies Found in Baghdad
    By Aseel Kami
    Reuters

    Monday 04 December 2006

    Police found some 50 bodies with gunshot wounds in Baghdad over the past day, an Interior Ministry source said on Monday, a day after U.N. chief Kofi Annan declared Iraq's plight as worse than civil war.

    Sectarian death squads have made the Iraqi capital a killing field and many of the bodies had been bound and tortured.

    President Bush was to host one of the most powerful leaders of the Muslim Shi'ite majority, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, who strongly denies charges that his supporters are among those who carry out assassinations.

    The White House meeting for Hakim is seen by some analysts as a sign of Bush delving more deeply into Iraqi politics in the quest for a new strategy that can stabilize Iraq and let American troops go home.

    Hakim's SCIRI movement maintains close ties to U.S. adversaries in Shi'ite Iran where the party was founded. Bush will also meet Iraq's Sunni vice president this month.

    Bush met Shi'ite Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki last week and assured him of his backing. They agreed to speed up training for Iraqi forces, which Maliki said could be in command of the country by June - despite qualms among U.S. commanders about the effectiveness and sectarian loyalties of many Iraqi units.

    Following a heavy defeat for his Republicans in last month's congressional elections, and two years before the party tries to retain the White House, Bush is expected to consider proposals to be made on Wednesday by the bipartisan Iraq Study Group co- chaired by former secretary of state James Baker.

    American voters are dismayed by the deaths of nearly 2,900 U.S. troops since the invasion in March 2003, while bloodshed among Iraqis has continued to mount.

    Nine US Soldiers Killed

    The deaths of nine U.S. soldiers were announced on Sunday, many killed in western Anbar province, where the three-year-old Sunni insurgency against U.S. forces and the Shi'ite-led government shows no sign of letting up.

    An Interior Ministry official said 50 bodies were found with gunshot wounds in different parts of Baghdad on Sunday. Most of the victims bore signs of torture.

    The figure of 50 would have seemed high three months ago but is now fairly typical in a city where U.N. officials estimated 120 civilians were being killed in violence daily in October.

    The latest Iraqi data indicate that the death rate could since have risen by more than 40 percent in November alone.

    Annan told the BBC: "When we had the strife in Lebanon and other places, we called that a civil war - this is much worse."

    In Washington, outgoing Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was revealed to have acknowledged in a memo just before he lost his job that U.S. strategy was not working and it might be better to reduce troop numbers.

    Many Iraqis and some of their leaders, however, believe that the present violence is substantially dampened by the presence of 140,000 heavily armed Americans. In Baghdad, they have used helicopter gunships to subdue efforts by militant groups to take and hold territory in the city in recent weeks.

    Were the Americans to pull out, many fear, sectarian bloodletting among the civilian population could be much worse.