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Former US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld remains largely defiant about the Iraq war, saying in a new book that had Saddam Hussein remained in power, the Middle East would be "far more perilous than it is today".

Mr Rumsfeld, 78, has written an autobiography due out next week.He concedes he could have sent more troops, and that internal US rivalries hampered post-war reconstruction. Leaked excerpts have been published by the Washington Post and New York Times.

Elite security forces under the control of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki are operating secret detention sites in Baghdad at which prisoners are being abused, according to a report by the watchdog group Human Rights Watch released Tuesday. One of the sites is at a military base where U.S. forces maintain an advisory team, the U.S. military confirmed.

Former prisoners who were held at another of the facilities, a military base in the Green Zone that was vacated by U.S. troops last summer, have told Human Rights Watch researchers that detainees there were regularly abused, by being hung upside down, beaten and given electric shocks to various body parts, including the genitals.

A coterie of well-connected Afghan businessmen and politicians may have plundered as much as $900m from the country's biggest commercial bank, three times the amount of earlier estimates, and the equivalent of about 7 per cent of Afghanistan's total gross domestic product.

Kabul Bank's funds were treated like personal accounts, it is claimed by several well-known members of Afghan society. Mahmoud Karzai, a brother of the Afghan President and prominent shareholder in Kabul Bank, told The New York Times that the bank's former chairman lent himself about $98m (£62m) to buy one of Afghanistan's airlines, and then used deposits to subsidise the carrier in an attempt to drive rivals out of business.

Afghanistan is expected to sign a formal agreement with the United Nations on Sunday to stop the recruitment of children into its police forces and ban the common practice of boys being used as sex slaves by military commanders, according to Afghan and United Nations officials.

The effort by Afghanistan’s international backers to rapidly expand the country’s police and military forces has had the unintended consequence of drawing many under-age boys into service, the officials conceded.

A car bomb ripped through a funeral tent in a mainly Shiite area of Baghdad on Thursday, the deadliest in a series of attacks that killed at least 40 people.

The blasts were the latest in more than a week of bombings that have killed more than 200 people, raising concerns about an uptick in violence as the U.S. military prepares to withdraw from the country.

The number of U.S. troops killed by roadside bombs in Afghanistan soared by 60 percent last year, while the number of those wounded almost tripled, new U.S. military statistics show.

All told, 268 U.S. troops were killed by the improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, in 2010, about as many as in the three previous years combined, according to the figures, obtained by The Washington Post. More than 3,360 troops were injured, an increase of 178 percent over the year before.