Iraqi police found 47 more bodies of death squad victims dumped in Baghdad overnight, they said today, after Washington said it was diverting troops from other parts of Iraq to secure the embattled capital.
The deaths brought the toll from such killings in the capital to nearly 180 in four days.
The US military denied US media reports that Iraq would dig a giant trench around the city in the next phase of a massive month-old security crackdown, but confirmed access will be tightened by forcing drivers to pass through checkpoints.
The military has acknowledged a "spike" in execution-style sectarian killings in the capital this week, but said violence has been reduced in the scattered neighborhoods it has targeted in "Operation Together Forward."
Police said most of the victims were bound, tortured and killed. Twenty six bodies were found in the mainly Sunni western part of the capital with the other 21 found in eastern Baghdad's predominantly Shia side.
A suicide car bomber killed one civilian and wounded 22 outside a well-fortified police station in southern Baghdad. Also in the capital, two Iraqi soldiers were killed by a bomb when they came to recover a corpse from a booby-trapped car.
The United States has shifted its emphasis to the capital in recent months, after concluding that sectarian violence between Shias and Sunni Arabs was a greater threat than the Sunni Arab insurgency it has fought mainly in the west and north.
"Baghdad is our main effort right now," Lieutenant General Peter Chiarelli, the top US operational commander in Iraq, told Pentagon reporters in a briefing from Iraq.
US Lieutenant General Peter Chiarelli
He said some troops were being drawn down from Anbar province, the vast Western desert that has been the heartland of the Sunni insurgency and base of the Iraq branch of al-Qaeda, to be sent to the capital. He denied abandoning Anbar.
"There's not a commander in the world who wouldn't say he could use more forces. But I believe we have the forces that we need in al Anbar, understanding that al Anbar today is a supporting effort to what we're doing in Baghdad."
The tactic of drawing down forces in Anbar has caused controversy after a classified US Marine intelligence analysis leaked this week described Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda followers as the dominant political force in most of that province. It concluded that Washington could defeat insurgents in Anbar only if it sent an extra division of troops there.
In order to focus on Baghdad, the United States has already extended the Iraq tours of thousands of troops and drawn them down from other parts of the country.
Iraq's Interior Ministry announced earlier this week that it would set up checkpoints at 28 access points and close all other roads into Baghdad as part of the next phase of the operation.
The New York Timesquoted an Interior Ministry official as saying that the plan would also involve digging a giant trench around the city of seven million people. But a US military spokesman said the description sounded like an exaggeration of the plan unveiled earlier in the week.
"No doubt there will be some trenches involved in this, but to say there is going to be a moat around the city is a bit of a stretch," Lieutenant Colonel Barry Johnson said.
"They've called it a trench around Baghdad. Really what this is, is there's a series of obstacles that the Iraqi government are planning, and we're working with them, to ensure movement through checkpoints, to keep terrorists and extremists and criminals from using those (other) routes," Johnson said.
"So it's not a trench. It will be a series using the natural terrain that already exists such as canals, and some obstacles."
Baghdad is 60 miles in circumference and surrounded mostly by farmland. But the land is already crisscrossed by irrigation canals and mostly impassable for cars driving off roads.
Violence continued outside the capital as well. A roadside bomb killed three policemen in Baquba, north of Baghdad.