BAGHDAD, Iraq, March 14 — The police reported finding 68 bodies (updated: now 85) today scattered around the city, as the wave of reprisal killings for Sunday's attack on Shiite civilians appeared to gain steam.
The victims, all male, were shot or strangled after being bound and blindfolded. Many of the bodies were found in Sadr City, the Shiite-controlled area where Sunday's bombings took place, although 15 bodies were found in a minibus on a road west of Baghdad, according to the Iraqi Interior Ministry.
The wave of killings followed a graphic display of street violence on Monday, in which Shiite vigilantes seized four men suspected of terrorist attacks, interrogated them, beat them, killed them and left their bodies dangling from lampposts on Monday morning, witnesses and government officials said.
The sense of growing lawlessness deepened Monday night with a mortar strike against a well-known Sunni mosque in Baghdad, killing three people.
The spate of killings today continued the cycle of heightened violence that began with an assault last month on a Shiite shrine in Samarra, which in turn provoked a wave of Sunni mosque burnings. Now many people are worried about an extended tit-for-tat sectarian war.
Except that is for Republicans in Washington and those running for the Republican nomination for President like Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee who thinks prospects for civil war in Iraq are being "blown out of proportion."
I'd like Governor Huckabee to go over to Bagdad and visit all the Arkansas troops and tell them to their face the civil war is being blown out of proportion.. my guess is that they might have different opinion.
it seems to me the civil war is being blown into proportion. maybe that's what he meant.
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