(Recasts) By Ross Colvin BAGHDAD, Nov 22 (Reuters) - A country in chaos, a terrorised population under siege in neighbourhoods polarised on sectarian lines or on the move in their hundreds of thousands to escape worsening violence. That was the picture of Iraq depicted in a new U.N. human rights report on Wednesday. The report said the number of Iraqi deaths spiked in October in surging sectarian violence that has its epicentre in Baghdad, while more than 100,000 people are leaving Iraq every month and some 2 million have fled their homes since the 2003 invasion. The report raised questions about the sectarian loyalties and effectiveness of Iraq's 300,000-strong U.S.-trained security forces ahead of next week's meeting between U.S. President George W. Bush and Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki to discuss speeding up the handover of security control to Iraq. "There are increasing reports of militias and death squads operating from within the police ranks or in collusion with them," it said. "Its forces are increasingly accused of ... kidnapping, torture, murder, bribery ... extortion and theft." Its findings cast doubt on Maliki's recent assertion that Iraqi forces would be able to reduce violence within six months if they had control, saying in Kirkuk alone, half of the 5,000 police force and 13,000 soldiers were not reporting for duty. Baghdad, a densely populated religiously mixed city that is home to one third of Iraqis, was depicted as the faultline in the communal bloodshed between majority Shi'ites and Sunnis, with neighbourhoods polarising along religious lines. The report said sectarian killings were the main source of bloodshed, fuelled by insurgents, militias and criminal gangs. IRAQ CRACKDOWN The report said 3,709 Iraqis were killed in October, 120 a day and up from 3,345 in September. More than 70 percent of those were killed in Baghdad, with most of the bodies showing signs of gunshot wounds and torture. U.S. and Iraqi forces launched a district by district security crackdown in the capital in August in what U.S. generals described then as the defining battle of the war. The report relied on death toll figures provided by the Baghdad morgue and the Iraqi Health Ministry, but there is little consensus among U.S. and Iraqi officials on the politically sensitive figures. The U.N. human rights chief in Baghdad, Gianni Magazzeni conceded this at a news conference. A study in the Lancet medical journal sparked controversy in October with its finding that 655,000 Iraqis had died from the war. Iraq's health minister has put the toll at 150,000 but a government spokesman said last month it was more like 40,000. The U.N. report also said militias operated with impunity, making no secret of their links to political parties in the Shi'ite-led national unity government. "The more there's impunity and no one is punished ... the more it fuels the cycle of violence and counter violence," Magazzeni said. The Bush administration -- which U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan said this week was trapped in Iraq -- has expressed frustration at the government's failure to disband the militias. The report said the violence and increasing poverty had generated "unparalleled movements of population". More than 418,000 had fled their homes since February and 1.6 million had left Iraq since the U.S. invasion in 2003. Most of the 100,000 Iraqis fleeing the country every month are heading to neighbouring Sunni Muslim Syria and Jordan, the report said, a number of them doctors, lawyers, teachers and journalists, who it said were increasingly targets of violence.
