Discovery of bodies fuels sectarian tension

SUWAYRAH, Iraq -- The young woman clad head-to-toe in black glanced through dozens of police mug shots of murder victims yesterday looking for signs of her husband, missing now for six days.

''We do not know what happened to him," said the woman, Fatima Radi, 28. ''He is the father of two children."

Like others, she had come to a police station in Suwayrah, where local authorities are trying to determine the identity of corpses found nearby in the Tigris River in recent weeks -- a discovery that has elevated sectarian tensions and shaken the new Iraqi government before it has been able to form.

Ferreting fact from rumor is never easy in the incendiary climate of contemporary Iraq, where political leaders on all sides have endeavored to use gruesome events for partisan advantage.

Shi'ites say the killings are part of a Sunni campaign of ''ethnic cleansing" while Sunnis say the victims may include Sunnis detained by Shi'ite-dominated police forces.

But interviews with officials, families of victims, and other knowledgeable people both in Suwayrah and Baghdad have lent some measure of clarity to the murky and murderous rampage that police say has resulted in the discovery of at least 60 bodies in the muddy river here.

What has emerged is evidence of an intermittent series of sectarian killings that began more than a month ago, as Sunni Arab insurgents stepped up a brutal campaign of intimidation throughout the zone. Previously, Shi'ite officials had said the bodies resulted from a single episode of hostage-taking and a massacre in one town over the course of a few days.

Some victims, police say, may have been initially taken hostage. But police here say it is likely many were motorists passing through the area when stopped by masked men bearing Kalashnikov rifles at impromptu checkpoints.

Assailants were believed to have later executed those taken away -- a chillingly common practice in Iraq -- and dumped their remains in the river, where they washed downstream to this agricultural center. Despite the assertions on Wednesday of transitional President Jalal Talabani that all the victims and killers had been identified, the great majority of the dead remain anonymous.

''Most of the bodies cannot be identified," said the police commander in Suwayrah, Lieutenant Colonel Khalil Ubaid Kadim Al-Ajeeli. Suwayrah police, who are closest to the case, also say there are few clues as to the identity of the assailants.

Police have tried to photograph the face of each corpse -- though, in some cases, the dead are barely recognizable. However, those identified to date, through photos, rings, clothing, or other means, hail from a variety of towns and cities including Kut, to the south; Baghdad, to the north; and from as far away as Basra on the Persian Gulf.

Shi'ite politicians in Baghdad had declared that all or most of the victims came from the nearby village of Almadain, a Sunni-dominated speck on the map north of Suwayrah on the road to Baghdad. The evocation of the name of Almadain has become synonymous with mass hostage-taking and slaughter in political discourse in Baghdad.

The widespread presumption is that those murdered were singled out because they were Shi'ite, although Sunni insurgents have also been known to target fellow Sunnis and others for different reasons -- such as collaborating with US forces. But a major Sunni group in Baghdad yesterday voiced fears that some of those killed may have been Sunnis.

A public funeral procession was held yesterday in the Shi'ite holy city of Najaf for 19 people described as victims of the murders. The decomposed and disfigured bodies were driven through the streets in an open-bed truck as onlookers gawked at the remains. Prominent religious and political representatives joined relatives of the dead in paying their respects.

Tensions are likely to rise further today when the killings serve as a central topic of sermons in Shi'ite and Sunni mosques. Shi'ite leaders say the killings are the handiwork of Sunni Arab insurgents bent on driving away Shi'ites who have lived alongside them for generations. The leaders describe a reign of terror in both the Tigris and Euphrates river valleys south of Baghdad, where a series of religiously mixed towns form the frontier before the Shi'ite heartland to the South.

''We consider this an example of ethnic cleansing," said Jawad al-Maliki, a leading member of the Shi'ite coalition that holds a slim majority of seats in the new National Assembly.

Many Shi'ite families, Maliki and other Shi'ite leaders say, have abandoned the region because of the violence that has overtaken the mixed communities south of Baghdad.

But some Sunni Arabs worry that their own people, arrested by Shi'ite-dominated police and military forces in the area, may be among the dead.

''We . . . demand to know the fate of detained, missing, and kidnapped Sunnis," citizens of two nearby Sunni-dominated towns, Almadain and Alwihda, wrote in a letter released yesterday by the Muslim Scholars Association, a leading national Sunni group that has been skeptical about the reports of mass murder.

The group also cited the assassination in Baghdad early yesterday of a leading Sunni cleric as part of a ''sectarian purge" that has cost the lives of at least four other Sunni clerics in recent days.

The group blamed ''criminal hands close to some political parties" and close to the transitional government for the most recent killing.