The US ambassador to Iraq has conceded that Iraq could be headed for civil war but defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld has accused the media of exaggerating the problems in the violence-gripped country.
Mr Rumsfeld, an architect of the 2003 invasion of Iraq that led to the downfall of Saddam Hussein said: "There's always been a potential for a civil war," he said, adding he did not think "they're in a civil war today."
He said US and Arab media had inflated the number of sectarian murder and attacks on Mosques. "The steady stream of errors [in reports] all seem to be of a nature to inflame the situation and to give heart to the terrorists and to discourage those who hope for success in Iraq."
His comments came hours before 18 men were found strangled in a minibus in a suburb of Baghdad.
The bodies of men were found bound and blindfolded in the Amiriya neighbourhood. An Interior Ministry spokesman said today that it was unclear how the men died.
Police also found the bodies of four more men in an open field in Baladiyat, a mixed Sunni-Shiite neighbourhood in east Baghdad. The victims had been handcuffed and hanged, police Captain Mahir Hamad Moussa said.
Another a body, shot in the head, was found near a shop in the eastern Kamaliyah suburb, which has also suffered repeated attacks.
The grisly finds follow a surge of sectarian violence unleashed by the February 22nd bombing of a famed Shiite shrine in the central city of Samarra and reprisal attacks against Sunni mosques and clerics.
While Mr Rumsfeld said the problems in the country were being overstated, the Los Angeles Timesquoted US ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad saying Iraq was in serious danger of descending into sectarian civil war.
"We have opened the Pandora's box," he said. "If another incident [occurs], Iraq is really vulnerable," Mr Khalilzad said.
The US envoy is at the heart of talks to forge a coalition of Shi'ites, Sunnis and Kurds in Iraq. However, political divisions are stark and the parliament elected in December has still yet to sit in formal session as the dispute over who should be the prime minister remains seemingly intractable.
Agencies