BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) – Iraqi authorities hanged 13 insurgents Thursday, marking the first time militants have been executed in the country since Saddam Hussein was ousted, the government said. A series of explosions, including a car bomb that struck a Sunni mosque, and a shooting killed 16 civilians and wounded 31 as a dust storm enveloped the capital.

The U.S. military, meanwhile, confirmed claims that a mass abduction from a security firm was the work of kidnappers masquerading as Interior Ministry commandos.

In political developments, Shiite politicians said they had asked Kurdish President Jalal Talabani to convene parliament March 19, one week past the constitutional deadline, marking an apparent compromise in the battle over a second term for Shiite Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari.

The Cabinet announcement listed the name of only one of those hanged, Shukair Farid, a former policeman in the northern city of Mosul, who allegedly confessed that he had worked with Syrian foreign fighters to enlist fellow Iraqis to kill police and civilians.

“The competent authorities have today carried out the death sentences of 13 terrorists,” according to the statement.

It said Farid had “confessed that foreigners recruited him to spread the fear through killings and abductions.”

A judicial official said the death sentences were handed down in separate trials and were carried out in Baghdad.

“The 13 terrorists were tried in different courts and their trials began in 2005 and ended earlier this year,” an official of the Supreme Judiciary Council said, speaking on condition of anonymity due to fears of reprisal from insurgents.

In September, Iraq hanged three convicted murderers, the first executions since Saddam’s ouster in April 2003. They were convicted of killing three police officers, kidnapping and rape.

Capital punishment was suspended during the formal U.S. occupation, which ended in June 2004, and the Iraqis reinstated the penalty two months later for those found guilty of murder, endangering national security and distributing drugs, saying it was necessary to help put down the persistent insurgency.

The authorities also wanted to have the option of executing Saddam if he is convicted of crimes committed by his regime. Under the former dictator, 114 offenses were punishable by death.

Saddam and seven co-defendants are on trial for allegedly massacring more than 140 people in Dujail, north of Baghdad, after an assassination attempt against him in 1982.

Death sentences must be approved by the three-member presidential council headed by President Jalal Talabani, who opposes the death penalty. In the September executions and again in the Thursday hangings, Talabani refused to sign the authorization himself but gave his two vice presidents the authority.

In Washington, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said the U.S. military would depend on Iraqi security forces as much possible if Iraq’s sectarian violence grows into a full-fledged civil war.

“The plan is to prevent a civil war, and to the extent one were to occur, to have the _ from a security standpoint _ have the Iraqi security forces deal with it, to the extent they are able to,” Rumsfeld told the Senate Appropriations Committee as he testified in support of the administration’s request for $91 billion in funds mainly to pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

He said the key to avoiding civil war is for Iraq’s political leaders to form a government of national unity.

Gen. John Abizaid, head of the U.S. Central Command, suggested separately that Iraq has been moving in the direction of civil war and described the situation in Iraq as “changing in its nature from insurgency toward sectarian violence.”

One of the deadly blasts in Baghdad Thursday targeted an Iraqi army patrol in the mostly Sunni western neighborhood of Amariyah, killing nine civilians and wounding six, according to Interior Ministry Maj. Falah al-Mohammedawi.

A car bomb also exploded near the Sunni Al-Israa Walmiraj mosque in east Baghdad, killing five civilians and wounding 12 others, police Capt. Mahir Hamad Mousa said.

At Yarmouk Hospital in west Baghdad, a car bomb killed two people and wounded 13 as they entered the clinic, police Lt. Thaer Mahmoud said.

Also Thursday, a woman was gunned down as she left her west Baghdad home for work, said police Lt. Mohammed Khayoun, who claimed she was attacked because she worked in the capital’s American-controlled Green Zone.

In an audacious attack on locally owned security firm Wednesday, gunmen dressed as Interior Ministry commandos stormed into the company’s east Baghdad headquarters and took away 50 people, many of them former military personnel from Saddam Hussein’s regime.

“We can confirm based on our investigation that individuals dressed like this, in chocolate-chip desert combat uniforms, riding in eight vehicles, drove up and kidnapped 50 local nationals,” U.S. military spokesman Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch said, referring to his combat fatigues. “We don’t know who did that. In our conversations with Iraqi authorities, they don’t know either.”

The al-Rawafid Security Co. was attacked by gunmen who arrived in a convoy of vehicles, including several white SUVs and a pickup truck mounted with a heavy gun, that they used to carry away the hostages, said al-Mohammedawi.

The victims did not resist because they believed their abductors were police special forces working for the Interior Ministry, he said.

“It was a terrorist act,” ministry Undersecretary Maj. Gen. Ahmed al-Khefaji said.

Al-Rawafid headquarters are in Zayouna, a volatile neighborhood of Sunnis and Shiites in east Baghdad. One of its main clients is Iraqna, a cell phone company owned by Egyptian telecom giant Orascom.

The Sunni minority, which was dominant in the country under Saddam, complains it is under attack from death squads associated with the Interior Ministry, in charge of Iraq’s police. And, in the past two weeks _ since the bombing of a Shiite shrine in Samarra _ violence has become increasingly sectarian. Hundreds have been killed.

Lynch said that the U.S. military believed at least 452 civilians had died in violence after the Feb. 22 shrine bombing until the end of last week, although he offered no breakdown according religious sect or ethnicity.

The U.S. military reported the death of another Marine, killed Wednesday in insurgency-ridden Anbar province, the huge, largely desert expanse that stretches from Baghdad to the borders with Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Syria. At least 2,304 the number of U.S. service members have died since the war started in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.

Shiite legislators Khaled al-Attiyah and Khudayer al-Khuzai told The Associated Press that the request for parliament to convene had been delivered to Talabani, who on Sunday had sought to issue a decree that would have called the parliament into session on March 12, as spelled out in the constitution.

Talabani’s move was blocked when one of two vice presidents _ a Shiite _ initially refused to co-sign the decree as required by law. Vice President Adil Abdul-Mahdi relented Wednesday, but the issue still faced heated opposition from other Shiite political forces, especially in the powerful bloc loyal to radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.