More Than 50 Iraqis Found Dead in Tigris River

GWEN IFILL:

Robert Worth, welcome. We are hearing reports of an apparent assassination attempt on interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi that may have occurred this afternoon, this evening your time in Baghdad. What can you tell us?

ROBERT WORTH:

Well, it's still not clear exactly what happened. We know a bomb blew up outside one of Allawi's offices in Baghdad. They are pretty well-defended with glass walls and so forth. The early reports we have are that at least one police officer was killed. We don't have any reports of political figures having been killed, but it's still too early to really say. It's not even clear whether Allawi was in that building.

What we do know was that Prime Minister Allawi was involved in negotiations pretty late tonight with members of the dominant Shiite alliance here over still divvying up the cabinet posts in the new government. That government was supposed to be announced tomorrow, but given the current negotiations it may not well not be.

GWEN IFILL:

It may well not be. Well, there also seemed to be other signs of increased violence happening around the country. The report this morning from the report this morning from Jalal Talibani saying that there were 50 hostages found — bodies of 50 hostages found in the Tigris River. What can you tell us about that?

ROBERT WORTH:

It's a strange turn. This tale has gone back and forth. At first we had over the weekend the reports of as many as 150, but certainly several dozen Shiite hostages having been taken by Sunnis in that area of town, about ten or 15 miles south of Baghdad. The army went down on Sunday — three battalions of the Iraqi army found the town completely calm and found no sign of hostages.

We were then told that there seemed to be some kind of hoax or rumor gone wild. Dr. Allawi's office even put out a statement on Monday saying the town is completely calm, there are no hostages, and it appears to be all untrue. Today, president-elect Talibani seems to be saying that it is true, or some part of it is true. The details are still pretty foggy. So we're really waiting until tomorrow to find out more.

GWEN IFILL:

Are the details as foggy about the 19 bodies which were found apparently shot, assassinated and lined up in a stadium?

ROBERT WORTH:

No, that seems pretty clear from what we know. Out west of Baghdad in a town called Haditha, yeah, we were told that it was 20 soldiers were taken or were kidnapped basically from a bus and taken out to a soccer stadium where they were lined up and shot. One of them apparently survived. It's not the first time we've seen massacres like this, but it's pretty shocking.

GWEN IFILL:

What is the source of all of these kinds of clashes that we're hearing about? Are they Sunni-Shiite tensions which, if proved true, are just being played out with a continued insurgency?

ROBERT WORTH:

Well, I think we've seen a lot of new violence in the past week. The whole hostage episode again, there certainly were sectarian tensions implicit in that. But we're still not clear on what really happened there.

As far as the rest of the violence, the past week, we had a sort of lull in violence for more than two months after the elections. Then in the past week, especially in Baghdad, there's been a whole lot of car bombings. It's been about a dozen car bombings in Baghdad alone over the past week, dozens of people killed. There's been some suggestion by senior political figures here that it has to do with the new government forming.

Everyone has said the expectations have been that the new government will be announced and will take power in the next few days. So it makes sense. They've often timed violence like this for political events. It makes sense that they would have done this.

GWEN IFILL:

When you said earlier that there had been some possibility of delay in announcing the new government that was first expected Thursday and now might be pushed back to later. Do you know if there's any connection between that and the violence?

ROBERT WORTH:

No, I don't think so. There's been difficulties of Dr. Allawi's party is asking for four cabinet positions and the Shiites who have majority of the seats in the national assembly and therefore the dominant figures in the government don't want to give him that much.

There's also some trouble, there have been a certain number of seats allotted to Sunni Arabs in the new government, but the Sunnis are very fractious and not united. And so it's been difficult for them to sort of agree on who they want to nominate. It's really — those are the issues that seem to be causing the delay, rather than the violence itself. But certainly the violence, you know, drives up the tensions around this process.

GWEN IFILL:

Well, again, I guess that's what I was going to ask next, which is, when you see this kind of uncertainty surrounding the political process and uncertainty regarding the violence, which doesn't seem to be tailing off at all, how fragile do things seem on the ground politically and also safety-wise?

ROBERT WORTH:

Yeah, there's no question that things have gotten worse in the past week, and the episode in Maddin where the hostages allegedly took place seem to be coming partly out of kind of a political vacuum. You saw so many rumors driving up so quickly. It was so unclear what was really happening.

I think that was partly because of this sense that one government had more or less stepped back, but the new one had not yet stepped in. And it was sort of a volatile atmosphere, one in which rumors could quickly spread. And as you say, the violence has made things more difficult for everybody.

GWEN IFILL:

Robert Worth of The New York Times, thank you very much.

ROBERT WORTH:

Thank you.