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| Iraq |
| 86 bodies found in Baghdad |
| 2006-03-15 |
| Asked for directions to one newly found pile of bodies in Baghdad, Haider Latif Ugaili, an 18-year-old black-market gasoline vendor, replied: That one's over there. But we found three bodies here this morning. Daylight Tuesday brought the discovery of at least 86 shot or strangled men across the city, most of them with hands tied and many of them tortured, according to police. They included 27 corpses in one of the first mass graves to be found in the capital since the U.S. invasion three years ago. The day's high toll - of execution-style killings involving large numbers of victims, not the bombing deaths that have characterized insurgent attacks and dominated violence in Iraq for more than two years - appeared linked to escalating cycles of sectarian slaughter since the Feb. 22 bombing of a Shiite shrine in the city of Samarra. The toll since the bombing is nearing 1,000, according to government figures; four Iraqi and international officials tracking the toll say it topped that figure in the first week after the Samarra bombing. Tuesday's body count went largely unremarked upon in public statements by Iraqi leaders, including Shiite and other political figures who convened in a heavily guarded meeting in Baghdad meant to help kick off efforts to form a government, one day shy of three months after national elections. A Defense Ministry spokesman, Maj. Gen. Abdul Aziz Mohammed, said the day's victims included Shiites and Sunnis and called the killings "a premeditated attempt to incite civil war." The mass grave was found in a former gypsy enclave bordering a heavily Shiite neighborhood on the eastern edge of Baghdad. A police spokesman, Col. Hadi Hasan, said the victims were men aged 25 to 40. All were found with their hands tied and wearing civilian clothes, Hasan said. They appeared to have been killed between two and 10 days ago, police said. Children playing soccer discovered the grave by its smell, police separately told the Reuters news agency. In the west Baghdad neighborhood of Khadra, near a school, police found a minibus containing the bodies of 10 men. "Some of them were shot and some were choked by ropes," Hasan said. Another minibus in the western Sunni neighborhood of Amriya contained the corpses of eight men, and Hasan said all had been bound, blindfolded and shot. In Rustamiya, a mixed Sunni-Shiite neighborhood in southern Baghdad, authorities found five men shot dead and covered by blankets, Hasan said. Authorities picked up the bodies of 11 men in the mixed southern neighborhood of Madean. All wore the dishdasha, or traditional Arab dress, Hasan said. In Kasrah Atash, in southern Baghdad, killers left the bodies of seven men by the side of the road. The men had been tortured and shot, Hasan said, adding that a piece of paper left with their bodies stated: "The fate of traitors." Iraqi police also found more than 15 corpses Tuesday morning in Sadr City, according to Capt. Ahmed al-Ani, a spokesman for the Interior Ministry. Sadr City is a trash-strewn, dusty urban district that is home to 2 million Shiites, overwhelmingly loyal to Muqtada Al-Sadr, a young Shiite cleric and militia leader. The timing and means of Tuesday's killings raised suspicions that some of the deaths were retaliatory attacks for bombings Sunday evening that killed 58 people in Sadr City. The concerted series of bomb attacks was one of the deadliest of the war in the Shiite enclave and suggested Sunni insurgents or their allies had made their first inroads into the district, which is policed by Sadr's Mahdi Army militia, whose members number in the thousands. After the first wave of violence that followed the Feb. 22 mosque bombing, survivors accused black-clad Mahdi fighters of taking away men who were later found dead in Baghdad's morgue. Officials with Sadr's organization denied any role by his militia, and Sadr political leaders and spokesmen on Tuesday denied there had been any killings in Sadr City on Monday or Tuesday. The number of execution-style deaths reported by police and news media usually are only a fraction of the total, according to morgue statistics that have shown such killings doubling since the middle of last year. International officials say the morgue has been increasingly reluctant to disclose the number of execution-style killings, which are often linked with Shiite militias or the security forces of the Shiite-controlled Interior Ministry. On Tuesday, Health Ministry spokesman Qasim Yahya said he had no new figures for killings of any sort. The acting morgue director, Qais Hasan, declined to give any figures Tuesday without signed clearance from the Health Ministry. When that was obtained, he declined again to give any figures, saying he was away from his office and did not want to give an incorrect accounting. A worker outside the morgue said the Health Ministry over the weekend increased from once a week to twice a week its shipments of unclaimed bodies to the southern city of Najaf for burial, sending roughly 150 Friday and about 70 Monday. Mahdi Army fighters, who have adopted street clothes since people called attention to black-uniformed death squads after the mosque bombing, stood with AK-47 assault rifles and walkie-talkies outside the morgue and at a checkpoint in the neighborhood leading to the mass grave in east Baghdad. On a main road a few blocks from the mass grave, Ugaili, the black-market vendor, pointed to the spot a few feet away where he said police in pickup trucks and sport-utility vehicles had come to collect three blanket-covered bodies. They also retrieved either two or three from the other side of the road, he said. A laborer at the site, Ali Hussein, 19, gave the same account separately. "It's become normal to find bodies," Ugaili said. "It's every other day." Also Tuesday, Interior Minister Bayan Jabr amplified in an interview with the Associated Press accounts of what he said was a foiled al-Qaida plot to overrun Baghdad's Green Zone. Defense Minister Sadoun al-Dulaimi gave a similar account Monday, saying the plot involved more than 400 al-Qaeda fighters allegedly recruited to infiltrate Iraq's army and had been discovered with the arrest of one suspect. U.S. military and civilian spokesmen said they had no information on the alleged plot. U.S. Army officials also disclosed Tuesday that two men carrying Iraqi police identification and two men carrying identification of Aal-Sadr's Mahdi Army were among nine men arrested Monday on suspicion of involvement in a plot to assassinate Iraqi Interior Ministry officials. A U.S. Army patrol stopped the men in two vehicles for a random search on Monday night and found in each vehicle a "list of names and addresses of personnel to shoot on sight. Names on the list included" Interior Ministry officials, Maj. Steve Stover, a deputy public affairs officer with the 4th Infantry Division, said in an e-mail statement. The nine men were taken to a U.S. detention center, Stover said. The day's other reported dead included three bodies found in the northern city of Mosul, one Shiite pilgrim killed by a bomb near the southern city of Karbala, and the editor of an Iraqi weekly shot to death near his home in Baghdad, police told news agencies. The editor, Muhsin Khudhair, was the third Iraqi journalist killed in a week. The U.S. military also reported Tuesday the deaths of two American soldiers in Anbar province on Monday, without giving details. Tuesday's grisly finds unfolded as Iraqi politicians began what they said would be daily meetings between all of the main political parties to form a national unity government. The creation of a government has been delayed for three months - since parliamentary elections Dec. 15 - by political power struggles, sectarian bloodshed and opposition to the Shiites' nominee for prime minister, Ibrahim al-Jafari, who has been interim prime minister for about a year. The meeting was hosted by Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, a prominent Shiite cleric and head of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, a key member of the Shiite coalition that won 130 seats in the December balloting, the largest block in the 275-member parliament. Participants in the meeting said afterward that little headway had been made. U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad said in an interview published Sunday in London's al-Hayat newspaper that the delay was "due to the fact that politicians are occupied with distribution of posts, and their discussions are about individuals. They have to understand that the interest of Iraq must come first, as we are in a crisis. The country is bleeding and headed for a civil war, and it's the responsibility of Iraqi politicians to feel people's pains and understand their needs." That sentiment was echoed in the streets of the capital Tuesday, where roadblocks, street closures and other security measures put in place for the gathering of political leaders at Hakim's headquarters caused gridlock across central Baghdad. "What kind of people are those politicians who did not even think of the people and how would they go to work and school?" said Ahmed Sabah, 23, a student at the Baghdad University. "How do they expect to build a developed country if an employee can't go to his job and a student and professor cannot go to their school?" "I am sure that after this terrible day," he said, "they will not agree on anything." |
| Posted by:Dan Darling |
| #11 Ah grom, you make me feel bad. I in no way meant to mock the dead - to the contrary, I'm angry that reporter used the dead as props in their propaganda pieces. I meant only to mock the reporters goulish use of the sights, sounds and smells of the dead - for the purpose creating an atmosphere of doom and gloom in the hopes that Americans and their allies will go home and leave the Iraqi's to a true bloody civil war. He failed to tell us the who what why and only engaged in the adjectives of creative writing to embellish the stats of the dead. it makes me mad. My heart goes to the victims and I'm truly sorry for overstating my point at their expense. |
| Posted by: 2b 2006-03-15 23:48 |
| #10 If I was a better man, I'd feel sorry for the victims and their families. |
| Posted by: gromgoru 2006-03-15 23:22 |
| #9 Not Mary Mapes? :) |
| Posted by: Glert Thetch2165 2006-03-15 21:09 |
| #8 might I suggest Ms. Lucy Ramirez as your field producer? |
| Posted by: Frank G 2006-03-15 21:07 |
| #7 lol! If selected, I promise to strive hard for the highly coveted Fake But Accurate Dan Rather Memorial reward. |
| Posted by: 2b 2006-03-15 19:29 |
| #6 Forget AP, straight to 60 Minutes 2b. |
| Posted by: 6 2006-03-15 17:38 |
| #5 :-) Thanks - I'm angling for an AP or Reuters job to report on Iraq. Nothing like sitting on a barstool in DC, making a few phone calls to get the death stats in Baghdad and getting paid to string together adjectives of sight, smell, and sounds. Who? What? Why? Where? When? - pshaw. Too much trouble. One could get hurt! |
| Posted by: 2b 2006-03-15 15:16 |
| #4 What's the name of the book, I want to buy it. There's a part where a grieving widow drags you home because she can't live another minute without abuse, isn't there. |
| Posted by: wxjames 2006-03-15 14:45 |
| #3 Definitely an A in Creative Writing 101, 2b. Clever! |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2006-03-15 13:33 |
| #2 It was a dark and stormy night. In this trash strewn city, brought to the brink of civil war, it was normal to find bodies covered with paper wrappers and flies. Families awakening to find loved ones missing would walk the filthy streets of this anguished city, filled with sectarian strife and the sickly sweet stench of death, in the hopes of finding their loved ones. They trudged through the gutters of blood and listened for the happy shrieks of children playing soccer. Children, accustomed to war, had discovered that the plentiful piles of gruesome graves provided the only happiness they could find in this city of death. An endless supply of soccer balls. I approached a woman in black at the edge of the soccer field. I asked her for directions and asked her, Can you give me any real interesting facts about who did this? About who the people were that were killed here? Were they Sadar's militia men? Were they Sunnis? Were they Shia? I don't know, she said. Can you give me anything other than adjectives that I haven't already abused and tortured to death? No, she said. Can you tell me anything of about what happened here? I asked No. Hey no problem!!, I exclaimed, puffing out my chest. I can still string 700 adjectives together without saying really anything at all. I'm an AP writer! |
| Posted by: 2b 2006-03-15 11:58 |
| #1 The nine men were taken to a U.S. detention center, Stover said. Turn these guys over to the |
| Posted by: wxjames 2006-03-15 11:10 |