BAGHDAD, 15 October 2006 — Gunmen murdered a family of 10, including five women and three children, just outside Baghdad, an Iraqi Army official said yesterday, as violence raged around the country.
Late on Friday night, gunmen attacked a farmhouse in Saifiyah, a restive rural area south of the capital and killed the entire family. The area has long been a scene of internecine communal violence and many of the town’s men had already fled for fear of their lives.
Iraqi police found the corpses of 14 murder victims scattered around the city of Baghdad between dawn on Friday and yesterday, many of them riddled with bullets and showing signs of torture.
Just downstream from the capital, in the village of Suweira, another four bodies were fished out of the Tigris, all lacking their heads. While bombs explode during the day in the beleaguered capital, shadowy death squads prowl the city at night, killing Iraqis from rival religious communities and leaving their tortured bodies to be found in the morning.
The grim daily toll of corpses increased during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, in what a US military spokesman described as a “tremendous spike” in violence.
Most of the killings have been laid at the feet of Shiite death squads, many with links to radical leader Moqtada Al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army militia. On Friday the preacher denounced groups carrying out such killings in his name. In other Baghdad violence, two members of the National Police were wounded when a roadside bomb exploded near their patrol yesterday.
In the southern Baghdad neighborhood of Abu Chir, a constant scene of violence, five members of a family were wounded when a mortar round crashed down on their house.
Alongside the sectarian killings, mortar duels between rival neighborhoods have taken their own toll on Baghdad residents.
In Diyala province, northeast of the capital, the Iraqi army reported that six gunmen and a female bystander were killed in a clash with US and Iraqi forces southwest of the provincial capital of Baquba.
Two civilians were also killed by gunmen in Baquba itself and a shopkeeper was shot dead in the central city of Samarra. Gunmen killed a teacher in the southern city of Diwaniyah in a drive-by shooting, said police, adding that they did not know why.
Revenge was apparently the motive when a Baathist official with the former regime was dragged from his house on Saturday morning by gunmen in the southern city of Amara. His body was later found near the bus station, said police.
Meanwhile, an Iraqi detainee has died of an apparent heart attack in Camp Bucca, a US-run prison in southern Iraq, the US military said yesterday. “The detainee was admitted to the hospital on Oct. 5 after complaining of chest pains,” the military said in a statement. In the early hours of Thursday morning he called for assistance.
“Doctors in the intensive care unit attempted to assist him in breathing; however, a cardiac monitor showed no pulse,” the statement said
Iraqi interior minister said he plans to reshuffle the ministry’s leadership to rid it of sectarian influence, after pressure from Western officials and with political support within Iraq, The New York Times reported yesterday.
Jawad Al Bolani, in a Friday interview with several US newspapers, affirmed that he had the support of Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki to make all necessary changes among his top commanders. “We have an urgent need,” the Times quoted Bolani as saying in what it characterized as his first in-depth conversation with the Western news media. “We have to have changes at this level.
In another development, a US citizen and five Iraqi accomplices were sentenced to death in Baghdad this week for kidnapping three Romanian journalists, a US Embassy spokesman said. The Romanian news agency Mediafax identified the American as 53-year-old Mohammed Munaf, who worked as a guide and interpreter for the reporters and was arrested by US forces shortly after they were released. Prima TV’s reporters were kidnapped by an Iraqi gang in March 2005 and released two months later. Munaf was accused of arranging their disappearance in order to claim a share of any ransom money.
