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70 Iraqis massacred in revenge attacks
By Mujahid Mohammed
AFP
MOSUL, Iraq
Petroleumworld.com 03 29 07
Gunmen massacred 70 men in an overnight rampage in revenge for bombings that killed 85 people in an ethnically mixed Iraqi town that US President George W. Bush once hailed as a beacon of hope.
Iraqi army Brigadier General Khorshid Dosti said 70 people were shot dead in an unprecedented reprisal assault on the town of Tal Afar on Tuesday, while another 40 remained missing and 30 more were wounded.
"We received 45 bodies of handcuffed and blindfolded men from al-Wahada neighbourhood overnight. They were killed yesterday just after the bomb," a hospital doctor had told AFP earlier in the day on condition of anonymity.
The mass shooting and lethal bombings underscore the raging sectarian warfare that continues to grip the country, alongside a Sunni insurgency against the Shiite-led government and its US backers.
The massacre of men, believed all to have been Sunni Arabs, was in revenge for bomb attacks that killed 85 people and wounded 183 in Shiite districts of the mixed town on Tuesday.
The town is witnessing its worst violence since Bush in March 2006 held up the onetime militant stronghold as a model for efforts to create a stable Iraq.
In the deadliest blast, a suicide bomber tricked soldiers into believing he was delivering food supplies to a Shiite area where he detonated his cargo of explosives in a crowd of waiting men and women.
Lieutenant Colonel Mohammed Ahmed Salah, a spokesman for the Iraqi army in the provincial capital of Mosul, confirmed there had been a "reprisal act."
"A violent incident happened (on Tuesday) and a reprisal act happened in al-Wahada, which is in the south of the town, just after the bombings," he said.
"The situation is under control right now and we have started an investigation into the incident."
The Iraqi army has slapped a strict curfew on the town, deployed armoured vehicles in the city centre and banned even police from moving, an official said, also on condition of anonymity.
The style of the revenge killings, with the victims handcuffed and blindfolded, suggested they were the work of Shiite militias which have carried out a wave of such attacks against Sunnis in the capital.
The US military said Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki had formed a committee composed of defence and interior ministry officials to investigate the Tal Afar attacks.
In other violence, 12 people were killed on Wednesday.
Two Iraqi policemen died in attacks on a local government building in the former rebel stronghold of Fallujah in western Iraq. Truck bombs loaded with chlorine gas were used, officials said.
A civilian was also wounded in an attack which targeted a joint Iraqi-US centre.
US First Lieutenant Shawn Mercer told AFP from Fallujah that two suicide truck bombers exploded chlorine gas near the building.
Insurgents loyal to Al-Qaeda have a strong presence in Al-Anbar province, which has seen a spate of attacks using chemical bombs, especially chlorine, against security forces and civilians.In another car bombing, two people were killed and 20 wounded in Al-Iman, near the town of Al-Mahawil south of Baghdad. Elsewhere eight more people were killed.
US officials meanwhile announced the deaths of two more servicemen and two civilians in Iraq.
One of the civilians, a contractor died on Tuesday after being wounded by rocket fire near the US embassy in Baghdad's heavily fortified Green Zone the previous day, US charge d'affaires Daniel Speckhard said.
One of the soldiers was also killed in a separate indirect fire attack in the Green Zone along with a US civilian, the military said. The attack left another soldier and two US civilians wounded.
US military spokesman Rear Admiral Mark Fox told reporters that the attacks on the Green Zone showed "desperation" on the part of insurgents following the security clampdown in Baghdad.
The latest deaths brought to 3,237 the US military's losses in Iraq since the March 2003 invasion.
AFP 28 1838 GMT 03 07
Copyright© 2007 AFP. All Rights Reserved.
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