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BAGHDAD (AP) — Police found the corpses of 18 men shot near a Sunni town just north of Baghdad on Friday, Iraqi officials said, hours after they were abducted by gunmen wearing military uniforms. Elsewhere near the capital, two separate bomb attacks killed four.
Such killings are reminiscent of Iraq's worst days of sectarian warfare in 2006 and 2007, when both Shiite and Sunni Muslim death squads roamed the streets and took people from their homes.
Police said the abducted men were killed with shots to the head. The bodies were found early Friday in farmland near the Sunni-dominated town of Mishahda, some 30 kilometers (20 miles) north of Baghdad. Gunmen in four cars snatched the men, who included two army officers, from their houses late Thursday.
Earlier this week, police found 13 bodies in areas around Baghdad.
Later, in the afternoon, a bomb went off inside a sheep market in Baghdad's southeastern suburb of Nahrawan, killing three and wounding six. And in the western Abu Ghraib suburb, a roadside bomb killed one wounded five others.
Two medical officials confirmed the causality figures. All officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to journalists.
Violence has been on the rise in Iraq in recent months since a deadly security crackdown in April on a Sunni protest camp north of Baghdad. More than 5,500 people have been killed since.
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