Police have recovered 60 bodies across Baghdad, most bound and tortured, officials said today, highlighting how sectarian death squads are still plaguing the Iraqi capital despite a major security drive.
In a separate incident two car bombs targeting police killed 22 people in the morning and wounded another 76 people. The first killed 14 outside Baghdad's traffic police headquarters, a second targeted guards at an electricity station in the east of the city.
The death of another US soldier was confirmed in Anbar province, where the commander denied suggestions his force had lost control to al Qaeda and other Sunni insurgents but said stabilising the western desert region would be a job for Iraqi politicians and their US-trained troops and police.
A US soldier was also killed overnight near Baghdad.
US and Iraqi leaders say the biggest threat to Iraq no longer comes from the three-year-old revolt among ousted President Saddam Hussein's fellow Sunni Muslims but from the bloodshed between Sunnis and the Shia majority now in power.
Parliamentary leaders met and failed to break deadlock over the issue of "federalism" - Shias want sweeping autonomy for their oil-rich southern provinces to match that of ethnic Kurds in the north. Sunnis want the constitution amended to strengthen the Baghdad government. Some fear civil war could result.
Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki met Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in Tehran. Iran's Shia Islamist leaders have pledged support and security for Iraq, drawing a wary response from Washington which accused Tehran of funding militants there.
Khamenei, echoing President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, called on the 145,000 US troops to leave Iraq: "Most problems in Iraq will be removed with the departure of occupiers. So we wish for their immediate evacuation," state media quoted him as saying.
Maliki says he wants the Americans gone, but not until Iraqi forces are capable of handling the violence they face.
An Interior Ministry official and sources at Baghdad police headquarters said a total of 60 unidentified bodies were found, freshly killed, in various parts of Baghdad over the past day.
Four others, one a woman, were fished out of the Tigris river just south of the capital - another daily occurrence. The tally was among the highest of late, despite a month-old security crackdown by reinforced US and Iraqi troops.
"But we've had worse days," the Interior Ministry official said. "Sometimes we sent 65 or even 100 to the morgue."
Fifteen bodies were found scattered, some in roadside garbage heaps, close to the Shi'ite militia stronghold of Sadr City in eastern Baghdad, he said. In the southern district of Saidiya, the bloodied remains of five bakers were discovered.
Most of the dead were bound and shot in the head and many bore signs of torture, the official said - marks of sectarian death squads and criminal kidnap gangs. The United Nations estimated two months ago that about 100 people a day were being killed in a covert sectarian dirty war.