'More troops' call as Iraq murders soar

The US military surge in Iraq, designed to turn around the course of the war, appears to be failing as senior US officers admit they need yet more troops and new figures show a sharp increase in the victims of death squads in Baghdad. In the first 11 days of May, there have already been 234 bodies–men murdered by death squads–dumped around the capital, a dramatic rise from the 137 found in the same period of April. Improving security in Baghdad and reducing death squad activity was described as one of the key aims of the US surge of over 25,000 additional troops, the final units of whom are due to arrive next month. In a further setback, the US military announced on May 12 the loss of an entire patrol south of Baghdad, with five soldiers dead and three others missing, after they were ambushed by insurgents in the town of Mahmoudiya. The new figures emerged as the commander of US forces in northern Iraq, Major General Benjamin Mixon, admitted he did not have enough soldiers to contain the escalating violence in Diyala province, which neighbors Baghdad. It has become the focus of the heaviest fighting between largely Sunni insurgent groups and the US Army, which has seen casualties increase by 300 percent in the province. Sixty-one US soldiers have been killed in Diyala this year, compared with 20 in all of last year. Mixon, in an interview earlier this year, has not made a secret of his frustration at the declining situation in Diyala and has already reinforced the area around Baquba–the center of the heaviest fighting–with additional troops. Ironically, the violence in Diyala has been exacerbated by an influx of both Shia and Sunni fighters displaced from Baghdad by the surge and also from Anbar province who have relocated to Diyala to join a series of jihadi and nationalist groups already based there. Mixon, who was speaking in Tikrit, said: "I'm going to need additional forces to get that situation to a more acceptable level, so the Iraqi security forces will be able in the future to handle that." He was also highly critical of the Iraqi government in Baghdad, charging that it was riddled with corruption. Mixon's request coincided with yet more bad news from Iraq–a draft US government report claiming that between 100,000 and 300,000 barrels a day of Iraq's declared oil production may have been siphoned off through corruption in the past four years. Iraqi and US officials have long contended that oil smuggling from fields controlled by Shia militias in the south is costing Iraq billions of dollars–funds that, it is feared, are going to armed groups.