22 More Bodies Found In Iraq
Police on Tuesday found the corpses of 22 Iraqi men who had been shot to death in southern Iraq, the government said.
The victims, all dressed in civilian clothes, had been shot in the head and dumped in a deserted area of Badrah district northeast of Kut city and 100 miles southeast of Baghdad, said Maj. Felah Al-Mohammedawi of Iraq's Interior Ministry.
He said most of the bodies were blindfolded with their hands tied together with rope or strips of plastic. Al-Mohammedawi said the victims seemed to have been killed several days ago. Their identities were not immediately known, but the district near the Iranian border is mostly Shiite. Police have blamed many of the insurgency killings on Sunnis.
This mass corpse find follows another, of 36 bodies found outside of Baghdad in a dry riverbed, CBS News correspondent Lara Logan reports. But these men, found blindfolded and executed, were Sunnis — and 16 of them were from one Baghdad street.
Logan reports that these deaths are part of secret, ruthless cleansing of the country's towns and cities — evidence of an undeclared civil war already underway in Iraq, between the Sunni minority who ruled this country under Saddam and the Shiite majority.
Several times over recent months large groups of bodies have been found in several areas of Iraq, including Baghdad. Al-Mohammedawi said the cause of the deaths near Kut would be investigated.
In other developments:
U.S. and Iraqi authorities said Tuesday their forces had killed the No. 2 official in the al Qaeda in Iraq organization in a weekend raid in Baghdad, claiming to have struck a "painful blow" to the country's most feared insurgent group.
Abdullah Abu Azzam led al Qaeda's operations in Baghdad, planning a brutal wave of suicide bombings in the capital since April, killing hundreds of people, officials said. He also controlled the finances for foreign fighters that flowed into Iraq to join the insurgency.
The nation's top military officer said Tuesday that the killing last weeekend of a senior leader of the al-Qaida in Iraq organization will hurt the terrorists but perhaps only in the short term. Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was asked at a Pentagon news conference with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld about the killing of Abdullah Abu Azzam on Sunday.
"It will have some effect, but over time they will replace people," Myers said.
"There are others, foreign fighters, marching to the guns on a regular basis," who can be promoted to leadership roles, he added, although in many cases they are less experienced and qualified in planning and executing attacks.
As CBS News national security correspondent David Martin first reported Monday, Abdullah Abu Azzam was a top aide to the organization's leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, controlling finances for the group's foreign and Iraqi fighters and running its operations in the capital.
Abu Azzam, who an Iraqi government spokesman said was an Iraqi, was the top deputy to the group's leader, Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Abu Azzam was on a list of Iraq's 29 most-wanted insurgents issued by the U.S. military in February and had a bounty of $50,000 on his head.
It was not immediately clear what effect Abu Azzam's death would have on al Qaeda in Iraq, which has been one of the deadliest militant groups, carrying out suicide attacks that targeted the country's Shiite majority. The U.S. military has claimed to have killed or captured leading al-Zarqawi aides in the past and attacks have continued unabated — although Abu Azzam appeared to be a more significant figure.
Iraqi government spokesman Laith Kubba called the killing of Abu Azzam a "painful blow" to al Qaeda, but warned that the group would likely carry out revenge attacks.
Abu Azzam was killed early Sunday when U.S. and Iraqi forces raided a high-rise apartment building in Baghdad, Lt. Col. Steve Boylan, a U.S. military spokesman, told the AP.
"They went in to capture him, he did not surrender, and he was killed in the raid," Boylan said.
The Iraqi and U.S. forces targeted the building after a tip from an Iraqi citizen, Kubba said. During the raid, the troops captured another militant in the apartment with Abu Azzam, Kubba said.
Abu Azzam — whose real name is Abdullah Najim Abdullah Mohamed Al-Jawari — was the No. 2 figure in al Qaeda in Iraq, Kubba and Boylan said.
He had claimed responsibility for the assassinations of a number of top politicians, including a car bomb in May 2004 that killed Izzadine Saleem, the president of the U.S.-appointed Governing Council, and a July 2004 attack that killed the governor of Nineveh province, the military said.