Also see below:     
Revenge Cycle Fragments Iraqi Capital    [

    Wave of Violence in Baghdad Puts 3-Day Death Toll Past 100
    By Kirk Semple
    The New York Times

    Wednesday 12 July 2006

    Baghdad, Iraq - More than 50 people were killed in Baghdad on Tuesday in violence that included a double suicide bombing near busy entrances to the fortified Green Zone, scattered shootings, mortar attacks, a series of car bombs and the ambush of a bus with Shiite mourners returning from a burial.

    Tuesday's killings, many of them apparently carried out with sectarian vengeance, raised the three-day death toll in the capital alone to well over 100, magnified the daunting challenges facing the new government and deepened a sense of dread among Iraqis.

    Many of the attacks, particularly those in neighborhoods primarily populated by one religious group or another, bore the hallmarks of sectarian militias, both Sunni Arab and Shiite. Militias now appear to be dictating the ebb and flow of life in Iraq, and have left the new government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki and his American counterparts scrambling to come up with a military and political strategy to combat them.

    Mr. Maliki has a security strategy for Baghdad, put in place a month ago, that features a constellation of new checkpoints.

    Also on Tuesday, Wisam Jabir Abdullah, an Iraqi diplomat posted in Iran who was visiting Baghdad, was kidnapped from his home by gunmen, an Interior Ministry official said. The official requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on the record.

    The worsening security crisis in Baghdad and several neighboring provinces, which many Iraqis are saying feels like a low-grade civil war, prompted lawmakers on Tuesday to summon the interior and defense ministers to address Parliament on Thursday, said Jalal Adin al-Saghir, a senior official in the country's largest Shiite political bloc.

    During the current spike in the violence, Mr. Maliki has been restrained in his comments. On Monday, he made an appeal for national unity during a speech in Iraqi Kurdistan, and during a press conference in Erbil on Tuesday, he dismissed the notion that the country was descending into civil war.

    "I don't see the country falling into a civil war, despite the regrettable activities of certain people who ignore that Iraq is united," the prime minister said, according to Agence France-Presse.

    At least eight more people were slain in insurgent attacks outside the capital, including the wife of a provincial governor, who was killed by a bomb while treating patients at her gynecology clinic. But Tuesday's violence was largely concentrated in Baghdad.

    The country's largest Sunni bloc said that in the interest of promoting calm, it would end its 10-day boycott of Parliament. Sunni legislators suspended their participation on July 2 after a colleague, Tayseer Najah al-Mashhadani, was kidnapped. Many Sunnis have blamed the abduction on the Mahdi Army, a militia loyal to the cleric Moktada al-Sadr.

    Mr. Sadr and his deputies, however, have denied any involvement.

    Alaa Makki, a Sunni leader, said in a telephone interview that the bloc's decision to participate once again was influenced by Mr. Sadr, who on Sunday issued an appeal for harmony and the convening of a special meeting of Parliament to address the sectarian bloodshed.

    The sudden surge in violence began Sunday morning when a group of Shiite gunmen appeared on the streets of a predominantly Sunni neighborhood in western Baghdad and began executing people. This vigilantism appeared to come as retribution for the bombing of a Shiite mosque the day before.

    It was closely followed on Sunday by what seemed to be retributive car bomb attacks against another Shiite mosque.

    Estimates of the number of killings in Baghdad on Sunday ranged from at least 30 to more than double that number. And at least 30 died in violence on Monday, officials said.

    In Tuesday's most deadly attack, two pedestrians wearing vests made of explosives blew themselves up near a restaurant outside the walls of the Green Zone, within a few hundred yards of three busy entrances, Iraqi and American officials said. Soon after the initial blasts, a hidden bomb was detonated nearby, adding to the carnage, the American military said. Some Iraqi authorities said the third explosion was caused by a car bomb.

    At least 15 Iraqi civilians and an Iraqi police officer were killed in the explosions, and 4 people were wounded, according to the American military command.

    In an Internet posting, two prominent insurgent groups claimed responsibility for the attacks.

    The Mujahedeen Shura Council in Iraq said it was behind the two suicide bombings, according to SITE Institute, which monitors jihadist postings on the Internet. The Islamic Army in Iraq claimed in a separate posting that it was responsible for the third explosion, which it said was a car bomb, according to a translation provided by SITE.

    The claims raise the possibility of a coordinated strike by the two groups, though they do not have a history of working together and, moreover, are thought to be rivals.

    The Islamic Army said it had struck in revenge for the rape and slaying of an Iraqi girl and the killing of three other family members in Mahmudiya. Five American soldiers, and a recently discharged soldier, have been implicated the case.

    In a predominantly Sunni area of Dawra, a district in southern Baghdad, gunmen ambushed a bus carrying Shiite mourners from the holy city of Najaf, where they had buried a relative, government officials and family members said. The gunmen pulled 10 people from the bus and executed them, the Interior Ministry official said.

    An hour earlier, in Taji, north of Baghdad, gunmen ambushed another bus, killing one person and wounding five, the official said.

    Two mortar grenades hit a Shiite mosque in Dawra, killing 9 and wounding 11 civilians, the Interior Ministry official said.

    In other violence, a family of five - a father, mother, grown daughter and two teenage sons - were found beheaded in a predominantly Sunni sector of Dawra, according to an official at Yarmouk Hospital, the main medical facility in western Baghdad.

    The police and hospital officials also reported that four car bombs around Baghdad killed at least 7 people and wounded at least 18.

    Gunmen raided a company's offices in the upper-middle-class Mansour neighborhood, killing three employees and wounding three, officials said.

    According to the official at Yarmouk Hospital, five bodies were discovered early Tuesday in Jihad, the neighborhood where dozens of people were reportedly executed by marauding gunmen on Sunday. It was unclear when the victims had been killed.

    In Tikrit, Saddam Hussein's hometown, a time bomb exploded in the clinic of Ameera al-Rubaie, the wife of the governor of Salahuddin Province, according to Agence France-Presse, which quoted the local police. Dr. Rubaie, a gynecologist, was killed and four of her patients were wounded, the police said, according to the wire service.

    In Baquba, north of Baghdad, the mayor of the Um Al Nawa district was assassinated by gunmen, the ministry official said. In the Shiite holy city of Karbala, a drive-by shooting killed two workers in the central market, according to the Interior Ministry official.

    An engineer and his bodyguard were assassinated on their way to work in Kirkuk on Tuesday morning, according to Col. Adel Zain Alabdin of the Iraqi police. A car bomb in Mosul killed two people and wounded four, the police said.

    Wijdan Mikhail Salim, Iraq's minister of human rights, said in a telephone interview that a government commission had been formed to study the possibility of scrapping a law that granted American troops immunity from Iraqi prosecution.

    In the trial of Saddam Hussein, the judges heard the closing arguments of two defendants, Abdullah Kadhum Ruweed and his son, Mizher Abdullah Ruweed, two local Baath Party officials from Dujail, a predominantly Shiite village.

    Mr. Hussein and seven co-defendants are accused in the torture and execution of 148 men and boys in the village in 1982.

    --------

    Reporting for this article was contributed by Hosham Hussein, Qais Mizher and an Iraqi employee of The New York Times from Baghdad, Iraqi employees of The Times from Kirkuk and Mosul, and Abdul Razzaq al-Saiedi from New York.

    Go to Original

    Revenge Cycle Fragments Iraqi Capital
    By Dan Murphy
    The Christian Science Monitor

    Wednesday 12 July 2006

Sectarian murders this week test Iraqi prime minister's promise to stabilize Baghdad.

    Baghdad - In the month since a new security plan was unveiled in the capital involving 10,000 Iraqi soldiers and police, sectarian murders and tit-for-tat mosque bombings by Shiite and Sunni militias have surged.

    A visit to Baghdad's Yarmuk Hospital reveals how far the capital has been thrust into civil war. In a 30-minute period Tuesday, the stream of tragedy through its doors included both Shiite and Sunni victims of rival killing squads, civilians and soldiers gunned down at work, and a fiercely angry boy who had just lost both parents.

    There is still hope that Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki will be able to stem the tide by getting the Army and police to act as peacekeepers between warring Muslim sects. But it appears that his political honeymoon, in Baghdad at least, may be over.

    "We have Iraqis killing Iraqis every day and the police do nothing,'' says Imad al-Zekki, waiting at the hospital to collect his murdered cousin's body for burial. "Where is Maliki? Is this what his security plan is all about?"

    Serial atrocities against Shiites and Sunnis in recent days, all in close proximity to police stations and US and Iraqi Army installations, are undermining confidence in Mr. Maliki's vows to restore stability quickly to Baghdad.

    "The country is sliding fast toward civil war," said Dawa parliamentarian Ali Adib during a contentious parliament session Tuesday in which the prime minister was attacked by members of his own Dawa Party for the sharp decline in basic security.

    The massacres - like the two-hour spree of a Shiite gang who roved over the mostly Sunni neighborhood of Jihad Sunday, killing about 50 Sunnis in a reprisal attack for the bombing of a Shiite prayer room Saturday evening - are now clearly being carried out by Iraqis, not the "outside forces" that so many here prefer to blame. Fitnah, a catch-all Arabic word for civil war and sectarian discord, is now on many Iraqis' lips.

    Police and Iraqi Army checkpoints have been more visible on Baghdad's major roads, but security forces have yet to patrol deeply into troubled neighborhoods, drawing complaints from both Shiite and Sunni politicians. They say that security forces are aiding the "other" side. US officials here admit that infiltration of the security forces by both Sunni insurgents and Shiite militias remains a major problem.

    Sectarian Divide Widens

    While there are no precise measures for sectarian hatred, the subjective evidence points to communal trust being at its lowest ebb since Saddam Hussein's regime was toppled in 2003. The bitterness of three years of political competition and occupation has made the city ripe for the spread of sectarian militias, leading to countless murders and personal tragedies.

    The destruction of the Shiite Askariya Shrine by Sunni insurgents last February, and the attacks on dozens of Sunni mosques by Shiite Mahdi Army militiamen afterward, further widened divisions and fed the current cycle of gruesome revenge attacks.

    In recent weeks, sectarian tension has risen to new heights. Baghdad's Yarmuk Hospital provides the grimmest of evidence of that.

    Tuesday evening, Iraqi soldiers roared up and carried a wounded comrade inside, shot in the leg in a firefight with Sunni insurgents in Dora; then Iraqi police commandoes arrived, bearing the wounded and the dead from a suicide car bomb on Karada Meriam street, a block from the protected Green Zone; then wailing was heard inside as an extended Shiite family learned their relative had died on the operating table. Two sedans pulled up with three Sunni victims of a shooting in Mansour - two dead men and a middle-aged woman, breathing but in shock.

    Hamid Khadim, a nurse, shrugs when asked how he copes with the daily toll. "You get used to it - today is about average for the past month,'' he says. "It's been like this since the new government was formed."

    Massacre in Jihad

    Sunday's massacre in Jihad - three miles from the airport and the US military's sprawling Camp Victory - shows how Baghdad's seemingly random violence is spreading hatred and institutionalizing atrocity.

    Tensions in the area - which is mostly Sunni but, unusually for suburbs west of the Tigris, still has many Shiites - have been running high all year. Until recently, the violence had been confined to assassinations of Shiite residents in ones and twos, notes slipped under doors warning Shiite residents to move or else, and roadside bombs.

    But, recently, Shiite residents have been getting organized into their own militias, with the help of Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army, according to two residents of the area - one a Shiite, the other Sunni. Since the Askariya shrine bombing on Feb. 22, locals deemed to be salafiyah - a rigid Sunni ideology that has much in common with the Wahabbism of Saudi Arabia - have been taken away at night and murdered, though not as often as Shiite residents, they say.

    After a recent string of explosions at Shiite mosques and Hosseiniya (Shiite prayer halls) to the west of the river, local Shiites have reportedly mounted their own intimidation campaign, with notes slipped under doors and murmured promises of revenge for future attacks.

    Fleeing to Safety

    On Saturday night, a bomb planted at the garage of the Zahra Hosseiniya, founded after the fall of the regime in a building confiscated from Mr. Hussein's Baath Party, killed eight worshippers leaving evening prayers.

    By 9 o'clock the next morning, revenge attacks were in full flow. One Shiite man, called by his brother to take two nieces and a nephew to a safer area, recalled the harrowing trip. After passing an armory for the national in a compound once used to train Hussein's domestic spy agency, he turned onto National Security Street, which marks the area's eastern edge, and found militias in control.

    A mile to the north, gunmen were manning a road block. Another gang stood watch a half-mile to the south. He darted into a residential street between their checkpoints, passed three bodies, and arrived at his brother's house.

    After talking with a Sunni neighbor who also wanted to move his children to a safer place, his brother loaned him a second car and they began to make their way from the neighborhood - past more bodies, with the witness ordering his young relatives to duck their heads beneath the seats, but too late to stop their tears.

    In front of the Zahra Hosseiniya - half a mile from Jihad's main police station - he saw gunmen roughly hauling blindfolded men - presumably Sunnis - into a waiting minibus. He called the police emergency line on his cellphone, but there was no answer.

    Finally back at the small side road he'd used to get into the neighborhood, the way out had been blocked with tires and concrete. He ordered his 12-year-old nephew, Haider, to hop out, "quick as you can," and remove the obstacles. The gunmen took little notice, and they sped off.

    "After about five minutes, we came to a police commando checkpoint. I told them, 'I'm a Shiite, but people are being slaughtered over there, do something,' " he says.

    "But they looked at me like I was crazy. 'If we go over there, they'll just run away. Why bother,' one of them said. I was there for over an hour - shooting was almost nonstop - and I didn't see a single police, Iraqi Army, or US Army patrol."

    Hoping for Justice

    Back at Yarmuk Hospital, bad news unleashed a cacophony of grief for Haider Abdel Satah and his family.

    The 13-year-old's father had just died in the operating room, joining his mother and 10 other relatives killed about an hour earlier. Haider said gunmen in uniforms opened fire on the minibus carrying the family and a dead relative - killed in a terrorist attack the day before - to the holy city of Najaf for a funeral.

    The attack happened on Mechanic's Bridge in Dora, a Sunni stronghold on Baghdad's southern edge. Insurgents and Iraqi soldiers have been holding prolonged firefights there all week.

    The bare-chested boy, his right bicep bandaged where a bullet fragment was extracted, stormed out of the emergency room when a group of Iraqi soldiers arrived with a wounded comrade. His grief became anger.

    "You killers and cowards,'' he shouted, an aunt trying to shush him. "You murdered my whole family!"

    Haider insisted that the army opened fire on the minibus, though an AP report Tuesday quoted Police Lt. Thaer Mahmoud as saying 10 members of the family were killed by unknown gunmen.

    Surrounded by extended family members, Haider was almost chillingly lucid, perhaps a byproduct of his childhood on Baghdad's Haifa street, where hundreds have been killed since the start of the war. He said the family was attacked with an RPK, a heavier variant of Ak-47 that fires 10 rounds per second.

    "I've seen the bodies of the wahabbi victims, I've seen the drill holes in their foreheads, but I've never seen as many bodies as I have of my family," he said. "The car came to a halt and they just kept shooting. I was reaching for my Dad's mobile when I got hit."

    "I want justice but I know I'm not going to get it."