Baghdad, Iraq – At least a dozen bodies were found buried at a garbage dump on the outskirts of Baghdad today, some of them blindfolded and shot in the head, Iraqi officials said.
Meanwhile, insurgents detonated two suicide car bombs – one at a market south of Baghdad that killed 14 people and another in Saddam Hussein’s hometown of Tikrit that targeted security forces and killed eight police officers on board a minibus.
The attacks were part of a surge of violence that has killed at least 269 people – many of them Iraqi soldiers and police – since Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari announced his new government April 28 with seven Cabinet positions still undecided.
Iraq’s new Cabinet held its first meeting Thursday to decide a plan of action. Al-Jaafari aide Laith Kuba said the seven vacancies, including the key oil and defense ministries, would be filled by Saturday and parliament would be asked to vote on them Sunday.
Scavengers sifting through garbage for scrap metal and other items to sell stumbled across the bodies at the dump in Kasra Waatash, on the northeastern edge of Baghdad, police and soldiers said.
There were conflicting accounts of how many bodies were found. Bassim al-Maslokhi, a soldier who was guarding the area during the recovery, counted 14; Kadhim al-Itabi, a local police chief, put the number at 12.
The victims, believed to be Iraqis, were found in shallow graves and seemed to have been killed recently, al-Maslokhi said. Some were blindfolded and had been shot in the head, he said.
At Baghdad’s central morgue, an official said 12 bodies had been received. Families identified some of the victims as farmers who disappeared recently on their way to a market to sell their produce, said Rahoumi Jassim, a morgue official.
Authorities kept journalists at a distance from the dump. But an Associated Press photographer saw U.S. military, Iraqi police and soldiers at the scene, along with three ambulances.
Al-Itabi confirmed the victims had been shot. Mazin Fadhid, a policeman at the same station, said most appeared to be young men.
Some were dressed in traditional white robes, others in pants and shirts, and at least one was wearing a traffic officer’s uniform, he said.
In the Tikrit attack, a silver Opel packed with explosives – and with a taxi sign on its roof – destroyed a police minibus, said U.S. Army 1st Sgt. Brian Thomas and Iraqi army Maj. Salman Abdul Wahid.
The attack at the checkpoint on the eastern outskirts of Tikrit, 80 miles north of Baghdad, killed at least eight policemen, said police Lt. Col. Saad Abdul Hamid. Seven people were wounded: a policeman, two soldiers and four civilians, he said.
The suicide attack at the market south of Baghdad killed 14 people and wounded 43 – all civilians, police said.
The attack occurred in Suwayrah, 25 miles south of the capital, in a notorious insurgent stronghold known as the Triangle of Death, police Col. Ali al-Zarqani said.
U.S. military spokesman Maj. Wes Hayes confirmed a car bomb exploded in the town, but he did not know whether it was a suicide attack.
Elsewhere, two insurgents shot at American soldiers on patrol in south Baghdad early today, and one militant was killed in the return fire, the U.S. military said. Another insurgent was detained, the statement said.
At least 26 people were killed in four attacks Thursday.
In the deadliest attack, an insurgent with explosives strapped to his body joined a long line outside an army recruitment center in central Baghdad and blew himself up. At least 13 people were killed and 20 wounded in the blast, Lt. Salam Wahab said at the recruitment center.
At al-Yarmouk Hospital, the morgue was overflowing with mangled bodies after the blast. One man lay screaming on his bed – both his legs had been blown off. Pools of blood covered the floor.
It was the second such attack in as many days. On Wednesday, a suicide bomber blew himself up in a line of police recruits in the usually peaceful northern Kurdish city of Irbil, killing 60 Iraqis and wounding 150.
Col. Adnan Abdul Rahman, spokesman for the Iraqi Interior Ministry, said the use of suicide bomber belts has escalated since security has been stepped up around recruitment centers and other insurgent targets. Faced with car bombings, many of these centers have become small fortresses surrounded by concrete blast walls and razor wire.
Recent raids in and around Baghdad uncovered some assembled car bombs and foiled many attacks, Abdul Rahman said. “But it is rather difficult to find out about an explosive belt put on by a person,” he said.
Insurgents often target Iraqi security forces, which are being recruited and trained by the U.S.-led coalition as part of its exit strategy in Iraq. An estimated 1,800 Iraqi soldiers and police officers were killed between June 2004 and April 27 this year, the latest date for which statistics were available, according to the Brookings Institution in Washington.
