Iraqis to lead assault to take back Baghdad

Story Highlights

• NEW: U.S. military announces deaths of two soldiers
• Seventy-one bodies found; separately, car bomb kills two
• Effort to be aided by U.S.; "outlaws" to be routed regardless of sect
• Prime minister: Hussein execution followed fair trial, was not political

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BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki said on Saturday that Iraq's armed forces are set for an assault on Baghdad to take out militias and rogue security forces.

Aided by multinational troops, the Iraqi forces "will hunt down all outlaws regardless of their sectarian and political affiliations," al-Maliki said at an Iraqi Army Day parade.

"We will also severely punish those [security forces] who do not carry out orders or operate in a partisan or sectarian way," he said.

Forces will search out insurgents neighborhood-by-neighborhood, The Associated Press reported, and will start the assault this weekend.

The announcement came two days after al-Maliki and President Bush spoke by video conference for two hours.

Al-Maliki also defended the government's handling of Saddam Hussein's execution, which was captured by a clandestine cell phone video showing Shiite guards taunting Hussein just before his hanging.

"The execution was not a political decision, as some Iraqis claim. The judicial decision was done after a fair and a just trial that the dictator did not deserve," al-Maliki said. The execution only concerns Iraqis, he added, in a reference to criticism from other countries.

In an interview Thursday with the Israeli daily Yediot Ahronot, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak criticized the handling of Hussein's execution, saying it made "a martyr" of the former dictator, according to AP.

"When all's said and done, nobody will ever forget the circumstances and the manner in which Saddam was executed," AP quoted him as saying in the interview. "They have made him into a martyr, while the problems within Iraq remain."

Al-Maliki's vow to control Baghdad came on the same day that the head of the city's emergency police survived an apparent assassination attempt.

Gen. Ali al-Yassiri was not hurt when a car bomb detonated near his convoy Saturday morning, an Iraqi Interior Ministry official told CNN, but two police officers in his convoy were wounded. A bystander was killed, and another was hurt, the official added.

On Friday, gunmen killed the driver of Iraq's agriculture minister in the Dora district of southern Baghdad and also killed a police officer in the capital's western Adel neighborhood.

On Saturday, police found 71 unidentified bodies -- 27 with bullet wounds -- dumped near a cemetery in central Baghdad. Most showed signs of torture, and at least six of the dead are thought to have been hanged, police said.

Among the victims were the father, two uncles and four cousins of a Sunni police chief working in southern Baghdad, police said.

Also Saturday, a bomb exploded in a parked car at midday in the Dora neighborhood, killing two civilians and wounding four others.

Three mortar rounds landed in Baghdad's Green Zone, the Interior Ministry reported. There were no casualties.

Other developments

Two U.S. soldiers were killed in separate attacks in Iraq, the U.S. military said Sunday. One soldier was shot to death by insurgents while patrolling a well-traveled road in southwest Baghdad on Saturday. Another soldier, assigned to the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force Headquarters Group, died from wounds suffered during combat in Anbar province on Friday. The deaths raised to 3,001 the number of U.S. troops to die in the war. Seven American civilian contractors of the military also have died.

The U.S. is changing its military chiefs in Iraq, with Lt. Gen. David Petraeus set to replace Gen. George Casey as commander when Casey returns to the United States as Army chief of staff. Petraeus, the former head of the Army's 101st Airborne Division, has served in Iraq twice. (Watch how some say Petraeus will handle his role, as the U.S. faces a crossroads

)

President Bush is also expected to announce a new strategy for Iraq next week. But the new Democrat leaders of Congress signaled Friday they did not believe a troop increase would help. (Full story)

A Marine squad leader ordered five unarmed Iraqi civilians out of a taxi and shot them, witnesses say in a report on the killings in Haditha, Iraq, according to The Washington Post on Saturday. Staff. Sgt. Frank D. Wuterich, along with three Marines, were charged last month with the murder of 24 civilians, including women and children, in November 2005. (Full story)

CNN's Jomana Karadsheh, Sam Dagher and Arwa Damon contributed to this report.

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