BAGHDAD, 30 August 2005 — Insurgents executed 15 Iraqis after ambushing their vehicle on a road north of the rebel stronghold of Fallujah, police said yesterday.
The gunmen ordered the passengers out of the vehicle and lined them up before shooting them in broad daylight on Sunday afternoon, police quoted witnesses as saying.
They did not specify if the victims were civilians or off-duty security personnel, but said they were believed to be from the neighboring town of Saqlawiyah, in the Sunni triangle.
Pools of blood covered the scene of the attack on the desert road, next to empty cases of pistol and AK47 machine-gun bullets, suggesting that the victims were shot from close range.
The road was blocked for nearly 10 hours until tribesmen from the neighboring Sunni town of Ramadi evacuated the corpses, police added.
Fallujah, an overwhelmingly Sunni Arab town in the Euphrates valley west of Baghdad, was recaptured from rebel control in a massive US-backed offensive late last year but remains a bastion of support for the insurgents.
Yesterday, a leader of Iraq’s largest Sunni political group accused the security forces of being behind the recent killing of 36 Sunnis and warned that such acts could have unforeseeable consequences.
Tarek Al-Hashimi, secretary-general of the Iraqi Islamic Party, said squads in police uniforms kidnapped the 36 Sunnis from Baghdad’s northern neighborhood of Hurriyah. They were then executed and their bodies dumped in a dry riverbed south of the capital. The bodies were found four days ago. All the victims were shot in the head and some were cuffed.
“The Iraqi Islamic Party renews its condemnation and clearly accuses the current government,” he told reporters.
Al-Hashimi added that “the current government, especially the Interior Ministry, is responsible and must give a clear answer if it is involved in these acts of terrorism or is protecting terrorists and criminal groups that carried out such attacks,” he said.
The Interior Ministry, which is run by members of the Shiite group Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, has denied such accusations in the past saying anyone can buy police uniforms in the market.
Meanwhile, Iraq’s electoral commission announced yesterday it had extended the registration period in troubled Anbar province by a week in order to allow its residents to participate in the constitutional referendum and general elections later this year.
Safwat Rashid, an official with the Independent Electoral Commission, said that out of 28 registration centers in the western province, only 19 had opened so far. The nationwide drive to register voters for the Oct. 15 constitutional referendum and general elections in December opened on Aug. 3. A total of 544 voter centers are registering voters.
The commission said the decision to extend the period in Anbar until Sept. 7, was due to the fact that some centers opened late because of logistical and security reasons, “and in order to allow the biggest number of voters to (register), as well as because of demands by political groups.”
On Sunday, Sunni Arab representatives rejected the draft of the new constitution shortly after it was finalized by the dominant Shiite-Kurdish bloc. If two-thirds of voters in any three provinces reject the charter, the constitution will be defeated. Sunnis are in majority in four of Iraq’s 18 provinces.
The predominantly Sunni Anbar province, where insurgents have been especially active, has been a dangerous place for election workers since militants warned people not to take part in the ballots.
The number of eligible voters in Iraq is estimated at about 16 million. Some 14.2 million Iraqis were eligible to cast ballots in landmark elections in January for a 275-member Parliament and a local assembly in the Kurdish north. More than eight million people, most of them Shiite Muslims and Kurds, took part.
Many Sunnis, who dominated Iraq for decades, boycotted that vote fearing insurgent attacks or heeding calls by rebels and hard-line clerics.
But efforts to encourage them to join Iraq’s political process received a boost this month when Adnan Al-Dulaimi, spokesman of the General Conference for Sunnis in Iraq, endorsed the upcoming ballots. The Iraqi Islamic Party, the largest Sunni political group, has also urged people to go out and vote.
