BLASTS ROCK BAGHDAD DESPITE CRACKDOWN

More than 60 Iraqi civilians were killed and scores more wounded Sunday in a spate of ferocious bomb and gun attacks targeting mostly Shiite areas of the capital, ending days of relative calm since the start of the latest U.S.-Iraqi effort to quell violence and restore order.

Two U.S. troops were also reported killed Sunday in weekend fighting around Baghdad.

At the same time, Iraqi officials say the Baghdad security plan has significantly lowered the number of death-squad killings attributed primarily to Shiite Muslim militias around the capital.

The number of bodies found with bullet holes and dumped in desolate lots or waterways has continued a weeks-long decline, plummeting from peaks of 60 or 70 per day in December to a daily average of 13 in the last week, according to unofficial hospital and police reports.

Three such bodies were discovered in Baghdad on Sunday, an Interior Ministry official said.

Sunni insurgents, Shiite militias, criminal gangs and foreign extremists all take part in the violence in Iraq. The decline in death-squad killings suggests that the Baghdad security plan, which includes a major political component, has tripped up or partly neutralized organized Shiite militias while it has failed to halt Sunni Muslim extremists targeting Shiite civilians with suicide bombings.

“The reason behind the decline is the security plan and the fleeing of militants to other places,” said one ranking east Baghdad police official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of policies that bar law enforcement officials from speaking to the media without authorization. “Even those who’ve remained don’t feel free to move these days. We don’t see armed groups these days.”

U.S. fighter jets screeched above the capital as Operation Law and Order, as it is being called by Iraqi and American officials, continued for a sixth day.

Beginning Tuesday night, U.S. and Iraqi forces set up aggressive checkpoints in search of weapons and ringleaders of sectarian gangs.

While the security plan has gotten underway, U.S. officials have urged patience.

They say it will take months before all the additional 17,500 American troops destined for Baghdad arrive and begin to make a lasting difference on the streets. Beyond the capital, 4,000 other new U.S. troops will be deploying to Iraq.

In Sunday’s most deadly attacks, two car bombs exploded almost simultaneously outside busy main-street marketplaces in the Shiite-dominated New Baghdad district, killing 56 Iraqis and injuring 130. The blasts set fire to shops and cars.

Panicked survivors and passersby pushed the wounded into civilian cars and rushed them to two hospitals. A plume of thick black smoke arose as firefighters battled the flames for hours.

The lower-middle-class district of modest single-family homes populated by Shiites, Sunnis and Christians has been a frequent target of bombings.

“We were happy to see the American and Iraqi troops to protect us,” said Kamal Rasheed, a 28-year-old owner of a cellphone shop 200 yards from one of the explosions. “This morning, the troops were checking and searching. I am astonished at how such a violation took place.”

One witness said civilians in the neighborhood had apparently been lulled into a false sense of security.

“People didn’t care much about safety precautions because of the new security plan,” said Mohsen Musa, a 35-year-old bus driver.

Two other bombings targeted a restaurant and a police checkpoint in eastern Baghdad, killing two Iraqis and injuring 12 more. Gunmen in a Sunni neighborhood in central Baghdad and two districts south of the capital killed six civilians in drive-by shootings.

On Saturday, one U.S. soldier was killed in a grenade attack during a combat patrol in a northern Baghdad neighborhood, the military said, and another was killed by gunfire during a foot patrol north of the capital. The deaths brought to 3,135 the U.S. military toll since the March 2003 invasion, according to icasualties.org.

While Sunni attacks on civilian Shiites apparently continued Sunday, Shiite militia violence against Sunnis appears to be down, at least for now.

The death-squad killings began in the capital in 2005 as the Shiite-dominated government began allowing Shiite militia members to join the police force.

Authorities each day discovered dozens of victims, often bound and tortured before they were shot to death.

The killings intensified in 2006 when radical Shiite cleric Muqtada Sadr’s loyalists and militiamen began more actively participating in the security forces.

Victims’ families described early morning visits to their homes by men in police uniforms and vehicles who handcuffed and took away their loved ones, never to be seen alive again.

U.S. officials say the heavy troop presence under the new crackdown has discouraged some violent groups from operating with impunity.

“Any time we have a sustained presence anywhere, enemy activity dies off,” said Capt. Bill Parsons, a company commander of the 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, which is patrolling the streets of northern Baghdad in armored vehicles. “They’ll just either leave, or go into other areas, or they blend into the neighborhood.”

Not only has the number of sectarian killings declined, the manner in which they are carried out has become less brutal, said a Baghdad morgue official who requested anonymity.

“The corpses that reach the morgue do not have signs of torture,” he said. “They’re just ordinary killings.”

One security official at a Baghdad hospital said he believed that the increase in checkpoints made it difficult for death squads to interrogate and torture their victims.

“Now the gunmen are not able to kidnap people and keep them inside the trunks of their cars to take them away to a safe place to torture and kill them and dump them in a specific place,” said the official, who asked that he not be identified out of safety concerns. “That’s why the corpses are fewer in number nowadays and do not have signs of torture.”

The killings may have also declined because Sadr’s Al Mahdi army and other Shiite militias have come under intense political pressure to rein in their activities. Sadr has endorsed the latest security plan amid rumors that he and his followers have fled the country for Iran. But Sadr loyalists denied that the drop-off in sectarian killings was a result of any movement.

“The killings dropped because of the government’s hard work, not because the Mahdi army, as the media puts it, has fled Baghdad,” said Fatah Sheik, a pro-Sadr lawmaker.

Outside the capital, Iraqi officials began reopening key border crossings closed during the first few days of the crackdown. The Shalamja border passage linking the southern city of Basra to Iran was reopened Sunday after being shut for three days.

Overnight clashes erupted on Basra’s western edge. British forces say they were attacked by men armed with rocket-propelled grenades and said they wounded seven suspected insurgents. One neighborhood resident said three men were killed and five injured. All belonged to the Al Mahdi army, he said.

Tehran weighed in on the ongoing debate about the whereabouts of Sadr, denying that he was in the Islamic Republic. U.S. and Iraqi officials say he left for Iran ahead of the Baghdad security crackdown, but his aides have vehemently denied it.

“Muqtada Sadr is not in Iran,” Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammed Ali Hosseini said, according to the semiofficial Iranian Student News Agency. “This is part of the propaganda and psychological warfare by the United States in Iraq to pressure Iran.”

Elsewhere Sunday, the police chief of the southern city of Samawah narrowly avoided assassination when a roadside bomb struck his six-vehicle convoy. Four of his guards were injured.

In the city of Kut, gunmen killed a police officer.

daragahi@latimes.com

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Times staff writers Tina Susman and Zeena Kareem in Baghdad and special correspondents in Baghdad, Basra, Hillah, Kirkuk and Samawah contributed to this report.