IRAQ : ANOTHER WEEK OF GUT-CHURNING VIOLENCE

ONCE TOUTED TO BECOME AN 'ICON OF MIDDLE EAST DEMOCRACY'

BAGHDAD REMAINS THE MURDER CAPITAL CITY OF THE WORLD

Only a brainwashed monkey could think that the war in Iraq is going to take a turn for the better any time soon.

It is sovereign nation on the verge of splitting into three. It is the world centre for car-bombings, death-by-drill murders, kidnapping, beheadings and double skull shot executions.

From the UK Independent :

The conflict reached new heights of savagery this week, with the almost daily discovery of dozens of Iraqis whose mutilated, bullet-riddled bodies have been dumped in and around Baghdad.

The number of bodies showing signs of torture reached a peak on Thursday, when 60 were found. Several of this week's victims were floating in the river Tigris which flows through the capital.

The bodies have been left in both Sunni and Shia areas of Baghdad.

But there's confusion about who is actually responsible for the execution of some two hundred Iraqis in little more than a week :

But Iraqis say that the sudden upsurge in the killings cannot be blamed solely on the burgeoning sectarian warfare and the "death squads" run by Sunni and Shia militia.

"Like you, we are trying to understand," said one Iraqi official.

The Americans are afraid to give most of the Iraq Army, and police, the high-powered weapons they need to defend themselves in scores of cities and towns across the country.

The Americans claim to be nervous about giving higher calibre, faster-loading to Shiite recruits in case they pass them onto the murder squads slaughtering Sunnis, or become the next murder squad.

Fear of arming the 'good guys' in Iraq' means they are completely out-gunned on the streets. For starters.

From the UK Independent :

* MONDAY

Eleven bodies found showing signs of torture. Six of the 11 discovered floating in the Tigris river about 100 miles south of Baghdad. All were blindfolded, bound and showing signs of torture.

* TUESDAY

Twenty-nine Iraqis killed, 24 of them in Baghdad. Five bodies turn up in the Tigris. In eastern Baghdad, the bodies of two men are found dumped in the street. The men's hands and feet are tied; they have been shot in the head and chest. Three men's bodies found floating in the Tigris 25 miles south of Baghdad. The bodies are blindfolded, bound and showed signs of torture.

* WEDNESDAY

Sixty bodies are found scattered around Baghdad. Most are bound and have been shot in the head and many show signs of torture.

* THURSDAY

Thirty-two bodies are found after another night's sectarian violence, including a Shia family of seven executed in their home in a Sunni district in western Baghdad.

The leader of Iraq's biggest Sunni Arab group demands that the Shia-led government take steps to disarm the militias responsible.

* FRIDAY

Fifty more bodies are found in Baghdad, mostly shot in the head after being tied up and tortured. The US military admits a "spike" in the murder rate this week, despite a month-old security crackdown. Iraq's Deputy Prime Minister announces that the government plans to propose an anti-militia law in October.

The latest US plan is to dig miles of trenches, ditches and earthen mounds right around the entire city of Baghdad.

The Baghdad trenches are to be constructed with checkpoints around the city's 50-mile circumference to prevent insurgents entering the city. But they could take months to build.

Brigadier Abdul Karim, of the Interior Ministry, told the BBC that hundreds of minor roads would be sealed off, so the city could be accessed only at 28 checkpoints.

That won't make the locals any happier. And it will channel traffic into heavily congested streams, entering and leaving the city. These will be easy targets for car bombers, drive-bys and execution squads.

It's so bad in Baghdad, the Western obsession with tagging, or not tagging, the conflict as 'Civil War', matters no more.

The violence is so widespread, grim, savage and cold-blooded, it's almost absurd to think this is happening in a modern world city today.

"Ordinary killings are commonplace now. It shows that the counter-insurgency is not working. It's not an all-out civil war according to the definition. But the semantics really don't matter now, because what is happening is so horrendous."

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