I wonder is this the progress John McCain is talking about?

Shiite police kill up to 60 in revenge spree - USATODAY.com Shiite police kill up to 60 in revenge spree BAGHDAD (AP) — Shiite militants and police enraged by massive truck bombings in the northwestern town of Tal Afar went on a revenge spree against Sunni residents there on Wednesday, killing as many as 60 people, officials said. The gunmen began roaming Sunni neighborhoods in the city late Tuesday and continued through 8 a.m. Wednesday, shooting at residents and homes, according to police and a Sunni official. ON DEADLINE: Eyewitness account from Tal Afar hospital Witnesses said relatives of the Shiite victims in the truck bombings broke into the Sunni homes and either killed the men or dragged them outside and shot them in the streets. Ali al-Talafari, a Sunni member of the local Turkomen Front Party, said the Iraqi army had arrested 18 policemen accused of being involved after they were identified by the Sunni families targeted. But he said the attackers included Shiite militiamen. He said more than 60 Sunnis had been killed, but a senior hospital official in Tal Afar put the death toll at 45, with four wounded. The hospital official, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to security concerns, said the victims were men ages 15 to 60 and were killed with a shot to the back of the head. Police said earlier dozens of Sunnis were killed or wounded, but they had no precise figures, and communications problems made it difficult to reach them for an update. The shooting continued for more than two hours, the officials said. Army troops later moved into the Sunni areas to stop the violence and a curfew was slapped on the entire town, according to Wathiq al-Hamdani, the provincial police chief and his head of operations, Brig. Abdul-Karim al-Jibouri. "The situation is under control now," said al-Hamdani. "The local Tal Afar police have been confined to their bases and policemen from Mosul are moving there to replace them." The violence came a day after two truck bombs that shattered markets in the city, killing at least 63 people and wounding dozens in the second assault in four days. After Tuesday's bombings, suspected Sunni insurgents tried to ambush ambulances carrying the injured out of the northwestern city but were driven off by police gunfire, Iraqi authorities said. Tal Afar, 418 kilometers (260 miles) northwest of Baghdad, is in the province of Ninevah of which Mosul is the capital. It is a mainly Turkomen city with some 60% of its residents adhering to Shiite Islam and the rest mostly Sunnis. The city was an insurgent stronghold until an offensive by U.S. and Iraqi troops in September 2005, when rebel fighters fled into the countryside without a battle. Last March, U.S. President George W. Bush cited the operation as an example that gave him "confidence in our strategy." But even though U.S. and Iraqi forces put up sand barriers around Tal Afar to limit access, the city has suffered frequent insurgent attacks — Tuesday's was the deadliest since the war started. Among the largest previous attacks were suicide bombings that killed 20 people on Sept. 18 and 30 on Oct. 11, 2005. The Sunni owner of a grocery store in Tal Afar said the situation in the city was tense. Tal Afar resident, Ahmed kamal, Sunni owner of foodstuff shop described the situation in the city as tense. "There was a kind of stability in the city before and there is only fear about the future," Ahmed Kamal. "The attack on the Shiites was a criminal act. But on the other side, what is the guilt of innocent Sunnis who were killed?" "The victims from both sects have nothing to do with what happened. It is a carnage against both sects. This is a carnage against the Muslims," he added. The hard-line Sunni Association of Muslim Scholars said 50 people in the rampage in Tal Afar were killed and blamed Shiite-dominated security forces for the violence, saying it was further evidence "of the clear plot and coordination between the militias and the governmental forces of interior and defense to violate the civil rights according to a hateful sectarian policy that serves the interests of external countries and sides. The death toll in the bombings, as well as the shooting deaths on Wednesday, were among the worst bloodshed in a surge of violence across Iraq as militants on both sides of the sectarian divide apparently have fled to other parts of the country to avoid a U.S.-Iraqi security crackdown, raising tensions outside the capital. Suicide bombers also detonated explosives on trucks carrying highly toxic chlorine in Fallujah on Wednesday, wounding about 15 U.S. and Iraqi security forces, although the attackers were blocked from reaching government buildings, the American military said. The chlorine gas attack was the eighth launched since Jan. 28, when a suicide bomber driving a dump truck filled with explosives and a chlorine tank struck a quick-reaction force and Iraqi police in Ramadi, killing 16 people. A parked car bomb also struck a market in the predominantly Shiite city of Mahaweel, 60 kilometers (35 miles) south of Baghdad, killing at least four people and wounding 16. Nationwide, the number of deaths from car bombs has decreased slightly since the Baghdad security operation began Feb. 14, but it has more than doubled in areas outside the capital, according to an Associated Press tally. Car bombs killed at least 349 people in Baghdad in the six weeks since the crackdown began, down from 525 such deaths in the preceding six weeks. But the numbers killed by car bombs outside the capital jumped from at least 100 in the earlier period to at least 233 in the latest six weeks. Most of the bloodshed in Tal Afar on Tuesday came when an explosives-laden truck was detonated by remote control as people gathered to buy wheat flour it was carrying in the center of town. A few minutes earlier, a truck loaded with vegetables blew up near a wholesale market on the city's north side. Al-Jubouri said the first blast killed at least 62 people and wounded 150. The other bomb killed one person and wounded four, he said. On Saturday, a man wearing an explosives belt blew himself up outside a pastry shop in Tal Afar's central market area, killing at least 10 people and wounding three. Baghdad was not immune from the violence. A parked car bomb struck a busy commercial area in the religiously mixed western neighborhood of Baiyaa, killing at least three people and wounding 12, police said. A British soldier also was wounded by small-arms fire while on patrol in the southern city of Basra on Wednesday, military spokeswoman Capt. Katie Brown said. The helicopter that was evacuating the wounded soldier also came under fire, but it was able to take off as planned after British guards shot at the attacker, she said. Meanwhile, hundreds of Iraqis detained in the U.S.-led security crackdown in Baghdad are being held in two detention centers designed to hold at most a few dozen people, an Iraqi monitoring group said. The claim, which was first reported by the New York Times, said more than 700 people were packed into an area built for 75 at one of the detention centers, in Mahmoudiyah, south of Baghdad. The other center, on Muthanna Air Base on the western edge of Baghdad, held 272 people, including two women and four boys, in a space designed to hold about 50. Officials from the monitoring group said they did not know the sectarian composition of the detainee populations.