Fifty-three bullet-ridden bodies found in Baghdad

BAGHDAD: Fifty-three bullet-ridden corpses were discovered by Iraqi police in Baghdad on Saturday, including 15 dumped in one flashpoint neighbourhood in the war-torn capital, a security source said.   

The bodies -- all men who had been shot dead by unknown gunmen -- were found littered across the capital, in the latest of a string of such gruesome discoveries with Iraq in the throes of torturous sectarian warfare.   

Fifteen of the corpses, including that of an Iraqi army colonel, Abdel Rahman Mohammed, were found in a single spot in the Sunni Muslim neighbourhood of Ghazaliya, which borders a Shiite area in Baghdad.   

The grim discoveries came as at least another 11 people were killed in violence nationwide, including eight in highly volatile Diyala province.   

Two civilians and a soldier were shot dead in an attack in Dali Abbas, north of Baquba, the capital of Diyala, said a security source.   

In Baquba itself, two civilians died in a shootout pitting insurgents against police forces with another two civilians shot dead by masked gunmen in the north of the city, the same source said.

A policeman was killed in the village of Abu Said, near Baquba, when gunmen raked his patrol car with bullets.   

South of Baghdad, a four-year-old girl was killed and a man wounded in the town of Iskandiriyah when three mortars targeted a residential neighbourhood, a regional security source said.   

In the same area, a civilian was killed when two roadside bombs exploded, missing an Iraqi security force patrol that had been the intended target.   

Saturday's deaths came after Iraqi army special forces and US advisers called in an air strike and killed an enemy gunman during a raid on Sadr City, a Shiite militia bastion in east Baghdad, the US military said.   

Sadr City is a sprawling slum area of eastern Baghdad which is home to around 2.5 million mostly Shiites and several thousand armed fighters from radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army militia.   

Previous raids in the area have been criticised by Iraq's US-backed Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, who has been trying to draw Sadr into a political process of national reconciliation rather than military confrontation.