34 bodies found as Rice visits Iraq with focus on insurgency

Rice’s visit came the same day that police found the handcuffed bodies of 13 people shot dead and left in a Baghdad garbage dump.

The corpses of another 11 Iraqis, four of them beheaded, were found in Iskandariya, south of the capital in an area known as the ‘‘triangle of death’’. Ten Iraqi soldiers killed by insurgents were discovered on Saturday dumped in Ramadi, about 110 km west of Baghdad, authorities said.

In east Baghdad, gunmen killed Qasim al-Gharrawi, a cleric who was the local representative of Iraq’s most revered Shi’ite religious leader, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, officials said. Four police officers and two civilians were killed when two suicide bombers attacked the convoy of Raad Rashid, governor of Diyala province, but he escaped unharmed.

Rice arrived in Arbil to meet with Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani before moving on to Baghdad. Asked about the importance of drafting a new constitution byan August 15 deadline, Rice said, ‘‘Things do not happen overnight. We have become very impatient people. Iraq is emerging from a long national nightmare of tyranny into freedom.’’

In Anbar province, where US troops launched a major operation over the past week to hunt insurgents near the Syrian border, the kidnapped provincial governor was set free by his captors, Interior Ministry officials said on Sunday. —Reuters