BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki said on Saturday that Iraq's armed forces are set for an assault on Baghdad to take out militias and rogue security forces.
Aided by multinational troops, the Iraqi forces "will hunt down all outlaws regardless of their sectarian and political affiliations," al-Maliki said at an Iraqi Army Day parade.
"We will also severely punish those [security forces] who do not carry out orders or operate in a partisan or sectarian way," he said.
Forces will search out insurgents neighborhood-by-neighborhood, The Associated Press reported, and will start the assault this weekend.
The announcement came two days after al-Maliki and President Bush spoke by video conference for two hours.
Al-Maliki also defended the government's handling of Saddam Hussein's execution, which was captured by a clandestine cell phone video showing Shiite guards taunting Hussein just before his hanging.
"The execution was not a political decision, as some Iraqis claim. The judicial decision was done after a fair and a just trial that the dictator did not deserve," al-Maliki said. The execution only concerns Iraqis, he added, in a reference to criticism from other countries.
In an interview Thursday with the Israeli daily Yediot Ahronot, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak criticized the handling of Hussein's execution, saying it made "a martyr" of the former dictator, according to AP.
"When all's said and done, nobody will ever forget the circumstances and the manner in which Saddam was executed," AP quoted him as saying in the interview. "They have made him into a martyr, while the problems within Iraq remain."
Al-Maliki's vow to control Baghdad came on the same day that the head of the city's emergency police survived an apparent assassination attempt.
Gen. Ali al-Yassiri was not hurt when a car bomb detonated near his convoy Saturday morning, an Iraqi Interior Ministry official told CNN, but two police officers in his convoy were wounded. A bystander was killed, and another was hurt, the official added.
On Friday, gunmen killed the driver of Iraq's agriculture minister in the Dora district of southern Baghdad and also killed a police officer in the capital's western Adel neighborhood.
Also Saturday, police found 27 unidentified bodies, all with bullet wounds, dumped near a cemetery in central Baghdad. Police were having trouble recovering the bodies because of clashes in the area.
A car bomb also went off at midday Saturday in southern Baghdad's Dora neighborhood, killing two civilians and wounding four others.
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