Bodies pile up in Iraq as Bush meets Maliki
AFP, baghdad/ amman
Baghdad's overflowing morgues welcomed another grim daily harvest of bullet-riddled corpses yesterday as Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki met US President George W Bush and vowed to halt the violence. Iraqi security officials said they had recovered the bodies of 58 murder victims in Baghdad over the previous 24 hours -- a US spokeswoman confirmed 49 -- while a mass grave holding 28 corpses was found north of the city. These latest victims of Iraq's vicious sectarian conflict formed a gloomy backdrop to a crisis meeting in neighbouring Jordan between Bush and Maliki, whose embattled unity government has been undermined by the bloodshed. Bush took the opportunity to hail Maliki as a strong leader, denying reports that the White House was losing confidence in its key ally, and both leaders vowed to bring the sectarian fighting to an end. "He's the right guy for Iraq. We're going to help him, and it is in our interest to help him, for the sake of peace. He is a strong leader and wants a free and democratic Iraq to succeed," Bush told a joint news conference. For his part, Maliki said he had won an agreement from Bush that he will be allowed to take control of Iraq's security forces more quickly than had been planned to allow him to fight the insurgency in his own way. Currently the bulk of the fledgling Iraqi army comes under the day-to-day control of a US-led coalition, which also has 150,000 American troops. "We have agreed and we were clear on the need to speed up the transfer of security responsibilities to the Iraqi forces," Maliki said. Nevertheless, Bush explicitly ruled out setting a timetable for US forces to head home, a move which will anger Maliki's increasingly vocal opponents. Six ministers and 30 lawmakers loyal to the radical Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr suspended the role in Maliki's coalition on Wednesday to protest that the meeting with "the criminal Bush" was taking place at all. After the summit, one of the deputies said Sadr's bloc -- the largest in the 275-seat parliament -- was reaching out to other groups on both sides of the sectarian divide to build an anti-American alliance. "We are endeavouring to form a national front inside parliament to oppose the occupation," Salih al-Agaili told AFP.
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