Iraqi police said on Saturday that they had found 47 more bodies of death squad victims dumped in Baghdad overnight, following Washington’s announcement that it was diverting troops from other parts of the country to secure the embattled capital. The US military also on Saturday denied American media reports that Iraq would dig a giant trench around Baghdad in the next phase of a massive month-old security crackdown, but confirmed access would be tightened by forcing drivers to pass through checkpoints. The military has acknowledged a “spike” in execution-style sectarian killings in the capital this week, but said that violence had been reduced in the scattered neighbourhoods it was targeting in “Operation Together Forward”. Police said that most of the victims had been bound, tortured and killed. Twenty-six bodies were found in the mainly Sunni western part of the capital with the other 21 found in eastern Baghdad’s predominantly Shia side.
Meanwhile, a suicide bomber killed one civilian and wounded 22 outside a well-fortified police station in southern Baghdad. Also in the capital, three bomb blasts killed at least 16 people. “Baghdad is our main effort right now,” Lieutenant General Peter Chiarelli, the top US operational commander in Iraq, told Pentagon reporters in a briefing from Iraq on Friday. He said that some troops were being drawn down from Anbar province, the vast western desert that has been the heartland of the Sunni insurgency and base of Al Qaeda in Iraq, to be sent to the capital. He denied abandoning Anbar.