24 Bodies Found in Baghdad as Political Stalemate Persists
    By Kirk Semple
    The New York Times

    Wednesday 08 March 2006

    Baghdad - At least 24 bodies, most of them apparently garroted, were found in Baghdad during a 15-hour period, one of the highest single-day tallies of execution-style victims since the American invasion, the Iraqi police and American military said today.

    Though most of the bodies had been stripped of identification documents, the authorities have often discovered sectarian motivation behind such executions in the past. Sectarian violence has gradually seized this country in the past year but worsened considerably following the Feb. 22 bombing of a major Shiite shrine that pushed the country to the brink of civil war.

    Later today, gunmen wearing the uniforms of Interior Ministry commandos and driving government vehicles raided a private Iraqi security company, kidnapping about 50 employees and seizing weapons, computer equipment and documents in what a police official described as a "terrorist operation."

    American soldiers, responding to a report of a suspicious vehicle parked on the side of a road, discovered 18 bodies lying in and around a minibus at about 9:30 p.m. on Tuesday in the predominantly Sunni district of Amariya, officials said. The victims, all men, had been bound at the wrists and had bruises on their necks, suggesting they had been strangled with cord or wire, morgue and Interior Ministry officials said.

    Four of the men were Sunni drivers, according to a ministry official, though the police have not identified the sectarian allegiances of the other men. The day's other six victims, all but one of them blindfolded and shot, were dumped in four separate locations and found today, the official said; the final victim had been beheaded.

    The authorities said they did not know whether the killings, which they have grouped for the time being into five separate cases, were related in any way. Government officials had earlier reported that they had found as many as 29 victims.

    The discoveries came two weeks after the dramatic bombing of the Askariya shrine in Samarra, which sparked a wave of retributive killings, mainly by Shiite militias in eastern Baghdad, that left hundreds of people dead.

    Amid pleas by religious leaders and an expanded nationwide curfew, the violence subsided. But the sudden appearance of so many bodies today suggested that the violent expression of rage that sprung from the shrine bombing had not so much dissipated as gone underground.

    The bodies were found in scattered locations around the city. In addition to the 18 in Amariya, another was dumped separately in the same neighborhood, officials said; one in Rustamiya, a mixed Shiite and Sunni neighborhood in eastern Baghdad; two in Baladiyat, an eastern Baghdad neighborhood with a mixed population that witnessed a lot of violence following the Feb. 22 bombing; and two in Kadamiya, a predominantly Shiite neighborhood in north-central Baghdad.

    In the mass abduction reported at the security company this afternoon, workers were forced into the vehicles and, according to witnesses, did not resist because they assumed their abductors were government forces on a legitimate operation.

    "It's a terrorist operation, 100 percent," said an official who runs the Baghdad Police operations room. He refused to provide his name because he was not authorized to speak with the media.

    The company, al-Rawafid Security Co., is owned by a relative Sheik Ghazi al-Yawir, one of Iraq's two vice presidents and a Sunni Arab, according to a company employee who asked for anonymity for fear of retribution. Many of the company's employees are Sunni Arabs and related to Mr. Yawir, the employee said.

    Reports of illegal raids by uniformed government security forces or criminals masquerading as police, often targeting Sunni Arab interests, have become commonplace in the past year. Sunni Arab leaders have accused the Shiite-led Interior Ministry commandos of operating death squads in a dirty war against Sunni Arabs.

    In other violence, an American soldier from the 1st Brigade Combat Team, 1st Armored Division was killed and four others wounded when a concealed bomb exploded while they patrolled near the northern city of Tal Afar on Tuesday, the American military said today. The military released no further information about the attack or the victims.

    Insurgents also bombed two Iraqi police convoys in Baghdad today, killing at least five police officers and wounding several others including at least four civilians. In one attack, in the mixed Shiite-Sunni neighborhood of Al Kasra, a concealed bomb detonated as a police convoy drove by, killing four police officers and wounding one of their colleagues and four civilians, according to a police recruit interviewed at the scene.

    In the second attack, a hidden bomb exploded near a patrol of Interior Ministry police commandos, killing one of them and wounding three, police officials said.

    The violence unfolded as the country's political leaders continued to wrestle over the shape of a new government. According to a spokeswoman for the major Shiite political bloc, representatives from the offices of the prime minister, president and national assembly have agreed to meet on Thursday to try to resolve disagreements over who should be prime minister, a debate that has delayed the formation of a full four-year government. President Jalal Talabani has called the new Parliament into session on Sunday, but leaders of the major Shiite political bloc have threatened to block the meeting in response to Mr. Talabani's demand that they withdraw their nominee for prime minister.

    Under the Constitution, the largest political bloc has the right to choose the prime minister; the Shiites' nominee, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, the current prime minister, was selected last month in a closely contested vote within the major Shiite bloc. Kurdish, Sunni Arab and secular political leaders have called for the Shiites to withdraw Mr. Jaafari as their nominee and threatened to form an opposition bloc to block him unless the Shiites designate a more widely accepted candidate.

    According to The Associated Press, however, Iraq's Shiite vice president, Adil Abdul-Mahdi, signed Mr. Talabani's decree. But Mr. Abdul-Mahdi could not be contacted for comment and Kadum Shubbar, an aide to Mr. Mahdi, said in a telephone interview late today that he could not confirm that the vice president had signed the decree.

    Under the Iraqi Constitution, the new president and his two vice presidents must be selected by a two-thirds vote of Parliament within 30 days of the first session of the Parliament, according to Nathan Brown, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and an expert on Arab constitutionalism. Within 15 days of being named, the president must assign the prime ministerial candidate the task of forming a cabinet.

    The prime minister then has another 30 days to name his cabinet. The prime minister and his cabinet must be ratified by an absolute majority of the Parliament.