Iraqis Find 85 Bodies in 24-Hour Period - Yahoo! News

Iraqis Find 85 Bodies in 24-Hour Period - Yahoo! News: "Associated Press Writers 1 hour, 4 minutes ago

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Police in the past 24 hours have found the bodies of at least 85 people killed by execution-style shootings — a gruesome wave of apparent sectarian reprisal slayings, officials said Tuesday.
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Iraq's Interior Ministry announced a ban on driving in the capital to coincide with the first meeting of the new parliament Thursday. The ban takes effect at 8 p.m. Wednesday and lasts until 4 p.m. Thursday.
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Acting on an anonymous tip, police found a 6-by-8-yard hole in an empty field. It contained at least 27 dead men — most of them in their underwear — in Kamaliyah, a mostly Shiite east Baghdad suburb, said Interior Ministry Lt. Col. Falah al-Mohammedawi. He estimated they had been dead for three days.

Residents offered scarves to help cover the bodies, which were laid out on the ground. Police guarded the site as members of a Shiite militia dug for more corpses. An Associated Press photographer took pictures of the grave but was warned not to publish them.

An abandoned minibus containing 15 bodies was found Tuesday on the main road between two mostly Sunni neighborhoods in west Baghdad, not far from where another minibus containing 18 bodies was discovered last week, said Interior Ministry official Maj. Falah al-Mohammedawi.

At least 40 more bodies were discovered in various parts of Baghdad, including both Sunni and Shiite neighborhoods, he said.

They included four men shot in the head execution-style and hanged from electricity pylons in Sadr City, where two car bombs and four mortar rounds shattered shops and market stalls at nightfall Sunday as residents shopped for food.

Scores of frightened Shiite families have fled predominantly Sunni parts of Baghdad in recent weeks, some of them at gunpoint. More than 100 families arrived between Monday and Tuesday alone in Wasit province, in the southern Shiite heartland, said Haitham Ajaimi Manie, an official with the provisional migration directorate. More than 300 Baghdad families are now sheltering in the province, he said.

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"I wish I could tell you that the violence is waning and that the road ahead will be smooth," Bush said in the first of a series of speeches to mark the third anniversary of the start of the U.S.-led war in Iraq. "It will not. There will be more tough fighting and more days of struggle, and we will see more images of chaos and carnage in the days and months to come."

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