At least 51 bullet-riddled corpses were recovered from the streets of Baghdad over the past 24 hours, as Shi'ite and Sunni Muslims attended Friday prayers amid a spike in sectarian conflict.

In the past three days, police have found the bodies of more than 100 men shot dead execution-style.

On Friday, Interior Ministry spokesman Brigadier General Abdel Karim Khalaf said that 51 bodies were recovered in Baghdad in the past 24 hours. He said some of them were also of people killed in "criminal activities."

On Thursday, police reported finding 20 corpses and on Wednesday 64 bodies were registered by the capital's morgues.

On the same day, the US military reported that there was a "spike" in sectarian violence in Baghdad.

"A large portion of those are murder, execution-style type activity. It is associated with sectarian violence," US military spokesman Major General William Caldwell told reporters.

Baghdad is the epicentre of Shiite-Sunni sectarian conflict that has engulfed Iraq since the bombing of a revered Shi'ite shrine in February in the northern town of Samarra.

The violence in the capital has remained unabated despite a massive security crackdown Operation Together Forward by the US and Iraqi forces since mid-June.

Iraq's Sunni leaders have regularly charged that the sectarian killings are carried out by militias linked to Shi'ite political parties.

Sunni politician Adnan al-Dulaimi alleged on Thursday that "well known militias" were carrying out these sectarian killings.

"If strong measures are not taken soon, the country is going towards disaster and no one would be saved," said Dulaimi, a lawmaker and head of the National Accord Front, Iraq's largest Sunni parliamentary bloc.

"These well-known militias are pushing the country to the edge of catastrophe," he said in a statement.

The latest bout of sectarian bloodletting came as a suicide bomber killed two US soldiers and wounded 25 more on Thursday in a major attack on coalition troops.

The bomber detonated his vehicle "next to a hardened structure the guards were guarding" west of Baghdad, the US military said, without elaborating.

The military did not specify the exact location of the attack but said the explosion caused debris to be scattered into a concentrated troop area.

It said the wounded, four believed to be in serious condition, were evacuated by helicopter to a military hospital.

Earlier on Thursday, the military had announced the deaths of three more soldiers in other attacks, while on Friday it declared the deaths of two more troops.

In the past few months, the military's losses have jumped across Iraq. Since the start of this month, at least 27 servicemen have died, almost all in rebel attacks.

The latest fatalities brought the US military's losses since the March 2003 invasion to 2,677, according to an count based on Pentagon figures.

Source: China Daily