BAGHDAD - Baghdad police found more than 50 unidentified corpses scattered around the Iraqi capital on Saturday, as a vicious sectarian dirty war raged on in defiance a joint US-Iraqi security plan.
"Since morning police patrols have found 51 bodies riddled with bullets in various parts of Baghdad," an interior ministry official told AFP, speaking on condition of anonymity after night fell.
In recent months, Baghdad's streets have become a hunting ground for rival death squads linked with Sunni rebel groups and Shiite militias. Iraqi and UN officials say that more than 100 people are killed every day.
The latest killings follow the pattern of kidnapping and murder that is the hallmark of these gangs, and will further raise the political temperature as Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki battles to head off civil war.
Some 9,000 US troops and more than 40,000 Iraqi soldiers and police are deployed in Baghdad in support of Operation Together Forward, a joint security plan that has thus far done little to stem the mounting death toll.
The coalition said that by Wednesday this force had "cleared approximately 96,000 buildings, 80 mosques and 65 muhallas (administrative wards), detained more than 168 terrorist suspects (and) seized more than 1,735 weapons."
But despite this progress, the killings continue.
10/07/2006 18:44 GMT