BAGHDAD, 23 April 2007 — Insurgents killed 50 people in a new day of carnage in Iraq yesterday, including 23 members of a non-Muslim minority dragged from a bus and gunned down by the roadside, security officials said.

The violence came as the US military said it would press on with plans to wall in Baghdad’s most restive neighborhoods despite criticism from residents and many Iraqi politicians.

An American commander also announced plans to recruit more than 40,000 more troops into Iraq’s armed forces in 2007 as part of a $14-billion plan to develop their capabilities.

The non-Muslims from Iraq’s Yazidi minority were ambushed near the main northern city of Mosul, police Brig. Gen. Mohammed El-Waqa’a said. “Workers were traveling back from a textile plant in Mosul to their home in Bashika, east of the city,” he said. “Several gunmen stopped the buses, chose the Yazidi among the passengers and killed them in front of everybody.”

Police said a group of cars blocked the road in the Al-Nur neighborhood in the east of the city, while others set up a cordon to protect the gang that stormed the convoy. The captives were executed on a field by the road. Three wounded Yazidis survived, officers said.

The Yazidis, who number some 500,000, mainly in northern Iraq, speak a dialect of Kurdish but follow a pre-Islamic religion and have their own cultural traditions.

In Baghdad two car bomb explosions at a police station killed 16 people and wounded 95, security officials said.

The bombs struck outside the Al-Bayaa police station in the southwest of the city. The blast tore a massive crater in the road and devastated at least two civilian houses.

Eleven people were killed in other attacks, nine of them in the capital. Police in Baghdad also found the bodies of 11 men who had been killed execution-style, security officials said.

Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki, in Egypt on a regional tour to drum up support for the security plan, insisted the continuing violence was the work of Al-Qaeda not a reflection of communal animosities.

“Iraq is not witnessing a sectarian war,” Maliki said. “What is happening is only the activities by Al-Qaeda.” The US military said insurgents killed four more of its soldiers in and around Baghdad on Saturday, taking to 60 the military’s losses for April alone.

It also said that 15 militants linked to Al-Qaeda were killed in US airstrikes south of Baghdad yesterday. US commander Lt. Gen. Martin Dempsey said the American and Iraqi administrations will spend $14 billion on developing Iraqi forces, including hiring 40,000 new members in the next 18 months.

The plan will also involve equipping the existing security forces with new American-made M16 weapons, Dempsey said.

The US military said it would try to control the sectarian bloodshed in Baghdad by building high concrete walls to separate districts into protected enclaves.

Officers said they planned to extend a pilot project already under construction around the east Baghdad Sunni enclave of Adhamiyah to other parts of the capital despite opposition from residents and MPs.

But Iraqi politicians have accused the US military of hardening the city’s already bitter sectarian divisions. “Erecting a wall around Adhamiyah is the height of failure and a bad, faulty step that violates human rights,” said leading Kurdish MP Mahmud Othman.

“It’s an obvious sign that the policy of US and our government has failed to keep security.”

MP Iyad Al-Samarrai of the Islamic Party, a leading Sunni political party, said: “Will this wall be the last one in Baghdad? Unfortunately, the government and political blocs did not discuss this project. I am afraid that such measures won’t be supported by political blocs in future.”

Nassar Al-Rubaie, head of the political bloc loyal to Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr, accused the US forces of creating Iraq’s own Berlin Wall.