BAGHDAD (Reuters) – Iraqi police found 15 corpses yesterday, including three women shot in the head, in a bloody start to the holiday ending the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan, security sources said.
In other violence, two roadside bombs – one in Baghdad and another just southeast of the capital – killed a total of seven people, police and medics said.
This year’s Eid al-Fitr festival, marking the end of Ramadan, is filled with uncertainty and apprehension as Sunni insurgents set their sights on Baghdad and politicians struggle to form a power-sharing government capable of tackling them.
The Sunni insurgents seized swathes of the north last month, building on gains by comrades in the west of Iraq, and Iraq’s US-trained and funded army unravelled in the face of the lighting advance.
Shi’ite militias now rival government forces in their ability to confront the group formerly known as the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant.
Baghdad’s morgues are filling up once again with victims of sectarian slayings, kidnappings are on the rise and the bloodshed is forcing families to flee abroad or move to neighbourhoods where they feel less threatened.
Police found 15 corpses in different parts of the capital, security sources said. Among them were three women aged 25-30 who had been handcuffed and shot in the head execution-style in an industrial area just north of the Shi’ite Sadr City district.
Further details were not immediately available.
Critics say that Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, a Shi’ite Muslim, has inflamed sectarian divisions by marginalising Sunnis instead of unifying Iraqis against the insurgents, now called the Islamic State.
