BAGHDAD, 11 October 2006 — Iraqi police found 60 bodies dumped across Baghdad in the 24 hours until yesterday morning, the apparent victims of sectarian death squads blamed for escalating violence that threatens to pitch the country into civil war.
A bomb placed under a car outside a bakery in the mostly Sunni southern Baghdad district of Doura exploded at midday, reducing the shop to rubble and killing 10 people, many who had been queuing outside to buy bread, police said.
Iraq has been gripped by Sunni-Shiite bloodletting since the bombing of a revered Shiite shrine in February. The United Nations estimates 100 Iraqis die violently every day. In the most high-profile killing in recent weeks, gunmen in camouflage uniform on Monday shot dead the brother of Iraq’s Sunni vice president, Tareq Al-Hashemi. He was the third of Hashemi’s siblings to be killed since April.
Meanwhile, Kurdish women told yesterday how they had witnessed savage rapes and other horrors in Saddam Hussein’s death camps, as the ousted Iraqi leader’s genocide trial continued.
There were rowdy scenes as Saddam recited a verse from the Holy Qur’an to inspire his supporters but the judge cleared the dock and the case continued without the defendants.
One woman, speaking from behind a curtain to preserve her anonymity, told of how her family was captured by Iraqi forces in April 1988. Her grandmother died in the prison camp, while she witnessed terrible atrocities. A warder called Jaafar Al-Hillawi used to grope prisoners’ breasts, and one day caught a beautiful young woman from Koi Sanjaq, she said.
“He caught her and told her, ‘You are mine’. She spat in his face,” she told the court. “He tore her clothes and raped her in front of her parents. Then he shot her. She remained alive for several minutes and then died.”
