ABU QADDUM lays out the pictures of mutilated bodies dredged from the Tigris River like a player dealing cards.

Some had their hands cut off, others are headless or burnt. Another was strangled, with his tongue lolling out. He thinks one bloated, slime-covered corpse might be his younger brother.

The shocking images come from Iraq’s new killing fields — the small town of Madain just 20 miles from Baghdad.

In other times the massacre might have prompted calls for international intervention. But there are already 150,000 US and British troops in Iraq and this was done under their noses. Abu Qaddum’s pictures are a terrifying testament to the chaos of Iraq.

Madain has had no police force since a mob of criminals and insurgents burnt down the police station last year. The police fled.

Sunni guerrillas quickly took over, running the town as their own criminal fiefdom and randomly killing Shia residents, whom they considered infidels and US sympathisers. Then they launched an all-out attempt to purge the town of its Shias.

News of this “ethnic cleansing” leaked out in confusing rumours.

Shia officials spoke last weekend of a massive hostage-taking. But when Iraqi Interior Ministry commandos stormed the town they found car bombs, weapons and a training camp — but no kidnappers and no hostages. The whole story was dismissed as scaremongering.

Then the photographs of the bodies emerged and with them the tale of Abu Qaddum — a resident who survived the massacre and this week alerted President Talabani. “I think there may be 300 bodies in the Tigris,” he told The Times yesterday.

He recounted how, for the past year, Sunni insurgents have built bases in abandoned farmhouses in the lush river plains south of Baghdad.

First the gangs attacked Madain’s police station. An armed mob set fire to the building and the police cars. Emboldened by the lack of a response from the US-led occupation, the guerrillas then started using a former Republican Guard base as a training camp.

More guerrillas dribbled in, many affiliated to the extremist group Ansa al-Sunna and led by a Syrian called Annas Abu Ayman.

They installed a reign of terror, kidnapping government employees and members of Shia political parties. Sometimes the bodies surfaced in the palm groves, more often people just vanished.

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