BAGHDAD — A recent surge in killings with sectarian overtones has left at least two dozen Iraqis dead, angering the country's Sunni Arab minority as negotiations to draw them into a future government continue.
On Saturday, authorities identified two groups of corpses as those of young Sunni Arab men dumped in separate locations in a poor neighborhood of northwestern Baghdad.
The men had recently been detained by Iraqi security forces, and all the bodies bore signs of torture, Sunni Arab political and religious leaders said.
"They are raiding homes and mosques and making random arrests," said Harith Obeidi, a leader of a Sunni group that is part of negotiations to form a new government. "The people are in government cars and wearing the government uniforms. They arrest people and beat them during the raids, and after two days we find them killed on the road or at the morgue."
Sunni political officials allege that since May at least 1,600 Sunni Arabs have disappeared after such raids without any accounting for their whereabouts.
"To date, the results of the investigations did not come out," said a statement issued last week by the Iraqi Accordance Front, the main Sunni Arab political coalition now in talks to join the government.
Sunnis dominated Iraq under Saddam Hussein's regime. Majority Shiites, oppressed for centuries by successive Sunni rulers, have come to the political fore since the U.S.-led invasion upended Iraq's political order nearly three years ago.
A Sunni-driven insurgency has carried out a campaign of bombings and assassinations against the new Shiite-led government. Shiites control the security forces that stand accused by U.S. officials and human rights observers of spawning death squads that target the Sunni Arab community.
Sunni Arab leaders have been pressuring Iraq's Shiite and Kurdish leaders to remove Interior Minister Bayan Jabr, who has been accused of having close ties to a Shiite militia. The Sunnis used the recent upsurge in reported killings to underscore their contention that Jabr must go.
The two most recent batches of corpses were identified as those of men arrested in raids on two mosques, one Jan. 30 in Baghdad and another Thursday near Taji, north of the capital, Sunni leaders said.
Iraqi government authorities said they were investigating both incidents.
