BAGHDAD, 17 April 2005 — Iraqi and US-led forces raided parts of Madaen town yesterday searching for Shiite hostages threatened with death by insurgents, an Iraqi minister said.
“The city is now under the control of Iraqi and multinational forces. ... They are raiding areas where it is suspected that hostages may be,” Kassim Daoud told Al-Arabiya channel, referring to a standoff just south of Baghdad. Insurgents armed with rocket-propelled grenades and AK-47 assault rifles took up to 60 hostage in the town on Friday night and threatened to kill them unless Shiites leave the town.
The mass seizure of residents coincided with a string of insurgent attacks across the country in which at least 17 Iraqis were killed late Friday and yesterday, seven of them in one explosion in central Iraq.
In an incident likely to heighten sectarian tension between the majority Shiites, who swept January’s elections, and the embittered disempowered Sunnis, gunmen blew up an empty Shiite mosque in Madaen after taking the hostages.
An Interior Ministry official said the gunmen were threatening to kill the hostages unless all Shiites left the town which lies some 30 kilometers south of Baghdad.
Iraqi Army special forces have surrounded the town and there was a brief exchange of gunfire, the official added. The standoff began on Friday when the gunmen riding pick-up trucks seized hostages and called over loudspeakers on Shiites to leave, a Defense Ministry official said. Scores fled the town, some heading for the city of Kut further south.
“They have detained more than 60 people, including women and children, and they are threatening to kill them unless Shiites leave,” Capt. Haitham Mohammed of the Iraqi Army told AFP. Many Iraqi soldiers and police put on civilian clothing to flee the mixed Sunni-Shiite town, located on the Tigris River. An Interior Ministry official suggested events in Madaen could be a response to the abduction of Sunnis from the powerful Dulaimi tribe, who have a presence in the area.
In other violence, at least 17 people were killed late Friday and yesterday, including two US soldiers and a Turkish truck driver, in separate incidents, US and Iraqi officials said. In the most lethal attack, seven died, including a number of policemen, and five were wounded when a bomb went off in a crowded lunchtime restaurant in Baquba, north of the capital, police said.
In Baghdad, one civilian was killed and three wounded when a suicide bomber drove his car into a military-guarded convoy bringing to four the number of bombings in the capital since Thursday.
The Al-Qaeda-linked group of Abu Mussab Al-Zarqawi said in statements carried on the Internet that it carried out yesterday’s two suicide attacks, in Baquba and in Baghdad. The authenticity of the statements could not immediately be verified.
An Iraqi policeman was also shot dead in southern Baghdad yesterday afternoon while driving his car, the Interior Ministry said.
In continuing attacks on the estimated 140,000 US troops in Iraq, one American soldier, traveling in a convoy, was killed by an explosion near Taji, north of Baghdad, the US military said, one day after another had died of his wounds in an attack near Tikrit, further north. This brings to 1,547 the number of US military personnel killed in Iraq since the US-led invasion more than two years ago.
A Turkish truck driver was killed when a roadside bomb exploded near the northern oil refining town of Baiji setting his vehicle ablaze, said Iraqi police. This brought to eight the number of foreign truck drivers killed this year in northern Iraq.
— With input from agencies
