Violence pushes Iraq closer to civil war
Violence pushes Iraq closer to civil war
Copyright by Reuters, The Associated Press, and The New York Times
Published: July 9, 2006
BAGHDAD: Masked Shiite gunmen stormed through a Sunni Arab district of Baghdad on Sunday, dragging Sunnis from their cars, picking them out on the street and killing at least 41 in a dramatic escalation of sectarian violence that raised new fears that Iraq was on the brink of civil war.
As evening fell two car bombs exploded near a Shiite mosque in central Baghdad, killing 17 people and wounding 45, the police said.
The rampage in the western Jihad neighborhood was in apparent retaliation for the car bombing on Saturday night of another Shiite mosque that killed two people and wounded nine, the police and Shiite leaders said. Many of the victims Sunday were killed after being pulled from their cars at fake police checkpoints close to that mosque.
The violence comes as a blow to the national reconciliation plan of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, which aims to end the bloodletting between his fellow Shiites and the once-dominant Sunnis that has pitched Iraq toward all- out urban warfare in recent months.
Meanwhile, American military investigators formally accused four more soldiers of the rape and murder of a teenage Iraqi girl and the murder of her parents and younger sister south of Baghdad, the U.S. military said in a statement Sunday. A fifth soldier was formally accused of "dereliction of duty" for failing to report the offenses, the military said.
The five soldiers, all of whom are still on active duty in Iraq, have been accused of conspiring to commit the crimes with Steven Green, a recently discharged private who was arrested June 30 in North Carolina on suspicion of rape and murder in connection with the case.
Sunni leaders referred to the attacks in Baghdad on Sunday as a "massacre."
Iraqi troops, supported by American forces, swooped into western Baghdad late in the morning, soon after the shooting began, residents and security officials said, sealing off Jihad and imposing a curfew on the neighborhood.
President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd, appealed for unity.
Police Lieutenant Maitham Abdul- Razzaq said 41 bodies had been collected and taken to hospitals. Sunni clerics put the death toll at more than 50 in Jihad, a once a prosperous neighborhood of handsome villas owned by officials of Saddam Hussein's security service
Members of the medical staff at west Baghdad's main hospital said they had received 29 bodies, overwhelming their morgue.
U.S. and Iraqi security officials, however, said the casualty figures were much lower. Still, in the culture of violence that has seized Iraq, perceptions often count as much as fact, and residents throughout the city feared that the killings in the neighborhood of Jihad threatened to accelerate the cycle of violent, retributive justice between the Shiites and Sunnis that has threatened to trigger full-scale civil war.
Shiite militiamen wearing masks and black uniforms began roaming the Jihad neighborhood around 10 a.m., checking identification cards and abducting those people whose names indicating they were Sunni, said officials from the police and the Interior Ministry who declined to be named because of security concerns.
"Gunmen are killing Sunni civilians according to their identity cards," an Interior Ministry official said. Another official said Sunni men had been herded into side streets and gunned down.
Several of the bodies left lying in the streets had been bound and blindfolded, a feature of the worsening communal bloodshed that has gripped Iraq since the bombing of a revered Shiite mosque on Feb. 22.
Later on Sunday, armed men belonging to the Mahdi Army, the Shiite militia loyal to the radical cleric, Moktada al-Sadr, sealed off roads leading to the neighboring area of Shula, fearing reprisals, the police said, although Sadr and his aides denied their militiamen were behind the attacks.
A senior Shiite politician said the Mahdi Army fighters from eastern Baghdad had moved into Jihad on Sunday but insisted they were only taking on Sunni militants responsible for killing Shiites. "There are many terrorist groups in Jihad who are killing Shiite families so they went to fight them," he said.
Sadr on Sunday assured Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi, leader of the largest Sunni Arab party, that he would punish any of his militiamen if they had been involved. In a statement issued from his residence in the Shiite clerical capital of Najaf, he called on Shiites and Sunnis to "join hands for the sake of Iraq's independence and stability."
Mohammed Beshar al-Faydhi, a spokesman for a Sunni clerical association, told Al Jazeera television that he had documents proving the Mahdi Army was behind the attacks.
Although U.S. military spokesmen and officials from the Ministry of the Interior, which oversees the Iraqi security forces, said they could not confirm the accounts of the seemingly arbitrary assassinations, residents reached by telephone Sunday reported gunmen systematically rounding up and massacring Sunni men.
A Shiite shopkeeper said he saw heavily armed men pull four people out of a car, blindfold them and force them to stand to the side while they grabbed five others out of a minivan.
"After 10 minutes, the gunmen took the nine people to a place few meters away from the market and opened fire on them," Saad Jawad al-Azzawi said.
Wissam Mohammad al-Ani, a Sunni, said three gunmen stopped him as he was talking toward a bus stop and demanded his identification. They let him go after he produced a fake identification with a Shiite name, but they seized two young men standing nearby.
Clashes also broke out Sunday between gunmen and Iraqi police officers in at least three neighborhoods across the capital, the police and residents said. Three Shiite militiamen were killed in fighting with the security forces in one of them, the police said.
On Friday, Iraqi troops backed by U.S. jets raided a Shiite militia stronghold in Sadr City, killing and wounding dozens of people.
Maliki, a Shiite, has promised to disband the militias, blamed for much of the sectarian violence. But militias have flourished in large part because of the inability of the police, the Iraqi army and coalition forces to guarantee security.
Many Shiites believe the militias are their only protection against Sunni extremists such as Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, responsible for many attacks against Shiite civilians.
The violence is likely to complicate U.S. and Iraqi efforts to encourage disaffected Sunnis to abandon the Sunni- dominated insurgency and join in political life so that U.S. troops can begin to go home.
The deputy prime minister, Salam Zikam Ali al-Zubaie, a Sunni, meanwhile described the Jihad attack as "a real and ugly massacre," and blamed Iraqi security forces, widely believed to have been infiltrated by Shiite militias. "There are officers who instead of being in charge should be questioned and referred to judicial authorities," Zubaie told Al Jazeera. "Jihad is witnessing a catastrophic crime."
Copyright by Reuters, The Associated Press, and The New York Times
Published: July 9, 2006
BAGHDAD: Masked Shiite gunmen stormed through a Sunni Arab district of Baghdad on Sunday, dragging Sunnis from their cars, picking them out on the street and killing at least 41 in a dramatic escalation of sectarian violence that raised new fears that Iraq was on the brink of civil war.
As evening fell two car bombs exploded near a Shiite mosque in central Baghdad, killing 17 people and wounding 45, the police said.
The rampage in the western Jihad neighborhood was in apparent retaliation for the car bombing on Saturday night of another Shiite mosque that killed two people and wounded nine, the police and Shiite leaders said. Many of the victims Sunday were killed after being pulled from their cars at fake police checkpoints close to that mosque.
The violence comes as a blow to the national reconciliation plan of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, which aims to end the bloodletting between his fellow Shiites and the once-dominant Sunnis that has pitched Iraq toward all- out urban warfare in recent months.
Meanwhile, American military investigators formally accused four more soldiers of the rape and murder of a teenage Iraqi girl and the murder of her parents and younger sister south of Baghdad, the U.S. military said in a statement Sunday. A fifth soldier was formally accused of "dereliction of duty" for failing to report the offenses, the military said.
The five soldiers, all of whom are still on active duty in Iraq, have been accused of conspiring to commit the crimes with Steven Green, a recently discharged private who was arrested June 30 in North Carolina on suspicion of rape and murder in connection with the case.
Sunni leaders referred to the attacks in Baghdad on Sunday as a "massacre."
Iraqi troops, supported by American forces, swooped into western Baghdad late in the morning, soon after the shooting began, residents and security officials said, sealing off Jihad and imposing a curfew on the neighborhood.
President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd, appealed for unity.
Police Lieutenant Maitham Abdul- Razzaq said 41 bodies had been collected and taken to hospitals. Sunni clerics put the death toll at more than 50 in Jihad, a once a prosperous neighborhood of handsome villas owned by officials of Saddam Hussein's security service
Members of the medical staff at west Baghdad's main hospital said they had received 29 bodies, overwhelming their morgue.
U.S. and Iraqi security officials, however, said the casualty figures were much lower. Still, in the culture of violence that has seized Iraq, perceptions often count as much as fact, and residents throughout the city feared that the killings in the neighborhood of Jihad threatened to accelerate the cycle of violent, retributive justice between the Shiites and Sunnis that has threatened to trigger full-scale civil war.
Shiite militiamen wearing masks and black uniforms began roaming the Jihad neighborhood around 10 a.m., checking identification cards and abducting those people whose names indicating they were Sunni, said officials from the police and the Interior Ministry who declined to be named because of security concerns.
"Gunmen are killing Sunni civilians according to their identity cards," an Interior Ministry official said. Another official said Sunni men had been herded into side streets and gunned down.
Several of the bodies left lying in the streets had been bound and blindfolded, a feature of the worsening communal bloodshed that has gripped Iraq since the bombing of a revered Shiite mosque on Feb. 22.
Later on Sunday, armed men belonging to the Mahdi Army, the Shiite militia loyal to the radical cleric, Moktada al-Sadr, sealed off roads leading to the neighboring area of Shula, fearing reprisals, the police said, although Sadr and his aides denied their militiamen were behind the attacks.
A senior Shiite politician said the Mahdi Army fighters from eastern Baghdad had moved into Jihad on Sunday but insisted they were only taking on Sunni militants responsible for killing Shiites. "There are many terrorist groups in Jihad who are killing Shiite families so they went to fight them," he said.
Sadr on Sunday assured Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi, leader of the largest Sunni Arab party, that he would punish any of his militiamen if they had been involved. In a statement issued from his residence in the Shiite clerical capital of Najaf, he called on Shiites and Sunnis to "join hands for the sake of Iraq's independence and stability."
Mohammed Beshar al-Faydhi, a spokesman for a Sunni clerical association, told Al Jazeera television that he had documents proving the Mahdi Army was behind the attacks.
Although U.S. military spokesmen and officials from the Ministry of the Interior, which oversees the Iraqi security forces, said they could not confirm the accounts of the seemingly arbitrary assassinations, residents reached by telephone Sunday reported gunmen systematically rounding up and massacring Sunni men.
A Shiite shopkeeper said he saw heavily armed men pull four people out of a car, blindfold them and force them to stand to the side while they grabbed five others out of a minivan.
"After 10 minutes, the gunmen took the nine people to a place few meters away from the market and opened fire on them," Saad Jawad al-Azzawi said.
Wissam Mohammad al-Ani, a Sunni, said three gunmen stopped him as he was talking toward a bus stop and demanded his identification. They let him go after he produced a fake identification with a Shiite name, but they seized two young men standing nearby.
Clashes also broke out Sunday between gunmen and Iraqi police officers in at least three neighborhoods across the capital, the police and residents said. Three Shiite militiamen were killed in fighting with the security forces in one of them, the police said.
On Friday, Iraqi troops backed by U.S. jets raided a Shiite militia stronghold in Sadr City, killing and wounding dozens of people.
Maliki, a Shiite, has promised to disband the militias, blamed for much of the sectarian violence. But militias have flourished in large part because of the inability of the police, the Iraqi army and coalition forces to guarantee security.
Many Shiites believe the militias are their only protection against Sunni extremists such as Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, responsible for many attacks against Shiite civilians.
The violence is likely to complicate U.S. and Iraqi efforts to encourage disaffected Sunnis to abandon the Sunni- dominated insurgency and join in political life so that U.S. troops can begin to go home.
The deputy prime minister, Salam Zikam Ali al-Zubaie, a Sunni, meanwhile described the Jihad attack as "a real and ugly massacre," and blamed Iraqi security forces, widely believed to have been infiltrated by Shiite militias. "There are officers who instead of being in charge should be questioned and referred to judicial authorities," Zubaie told Al Jazeera. "Jihad is witnessing a catastrophic crime."
posted by Carlos T Mock at 8:58 AM
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