BAGHDAD, 26 November 2006 — Gunmen killed 21 Shiites as tit-for-tat violence raged across Iraq and Baghdad was under curfew for a second day yesterday, forcing President Jalal Talabani to delay a trip to Tehran.
Police said gunmen late Friday raided two homes in a mostly Shiite village in strife-torn Diyala province northeast of Baghdad, dragged out 21 males and shot them execution style.
The bodies of the villagers, who came from two families in the village of Imam Mansour 75 kilometers northeast of Baghdad, were found early yesterday. The youngest victim was 12.
Police said the gunmen arrived in five cars and took the men to nearby fields and shot them at point blank range. Like Baghdad, the mixed Diyala province is torn by sectarian strife, largely taking the form of attacks by Al-Qaeda affiliated insurgents on Shiite villagers.
The capital, the epicenter of the sectarian violence, remained under curfew for a second day yesterday after the deaths of at least 300 people since Thursday, when the politically sensitive district of Sadr City was hit by the deadliest string of bombings against Shiites since the war began in 2003.
The airport was also closed, forcing Talabani to postpone his trip to Tehran where he had been expected to discuss the country’s security situation with his Iranian counterpart Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
US President George W. Bush and Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki are expected to thrash out new strategies for Iraq, especially after growing calls from Democrats — newly victorious in midterm congressional elections - to bring the US troops home.
However the announced meeting has triggered political turmoil in Baghdad, with the Iraqi leader’s strong supporter Moqtada Sadr threatening to withdraw from the national unity government if it goes ahead.
On Friday, Sadr’s political group - which has 30 MPs in Parliament - said “it will pull out from the government if Bush and Maliki meet,” adding that the presence of US troops was the main cause of the rising bloodshed in Iraq.
Sadr’s people also accuse US troops of complicity, if not outright participation, in Thursday’s horrific Sadr City blasts. By far the largest attack in Iraq since the 2003 war in terms of the number of people killed, the bombings sparked new Shiite reprisals against Sunni Arabs.
Militiamen allegedly from Sadr’s Mahdi Army attacked Friday at least four mosques and a number of Sunni homes in Baghdad and killed nearly 30 people, security officials said.
Top Sunni leader Adnan Al-Dulaimi said that “a number of innocent civilians were killed” in the tit-for-tat violence.
Militiamen seen firing rockets and mortars from Sadr City into neighboring Sunni districts also came under attack from a US helicopter which destroyed their launchers.
Yesterday the US military raided a bomb-making facility near Taji, north of Baghdad, during which 10 insurgents and a teenager were killed, while another 12 insurgents were killed in a separate clash nearby, the military reported.
One civilian was killed and six wounded when a mortar fell on a wake in Baghdad’s southern Dura district yesterday.
Arab foreign ministers, meanwhile, are expected to meet in Cairo on Dec. 5 to call on Iraqi factions to end the “cascades of blood in Iraq,” Arab League officials said yesterday.
“The Arab League’s Iraq committee made up of 10 members, will meet in Cairo on Dec. 5 at foreign minister level,” said the League’s Assistant Secretary General for Arab Affairs Ahmed Bin Hilli told reporters.
The Organization of the Islamic Conference called yesterday for a halt to the Sunni-Shiite bloodbath in Iraq, reminding Iraqi religious leaders of their pledge to prohibit the shedding of Muslim blood.
Secretary-General Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu expressed “deep concern and sorrow at the heinous acts of violence in Iraq, the abhorrent sectarian fighting and the repugnant massacres among the brothers in faith,” said a statement.
In Amman, Iraq’s neighbors, Turkey and Jordan, warned yesterday that the partition of the country would take the sectarian bloodshed to new levels and plunge the whole region into chaos.
Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan and his Jordanian counterpart Marouf Bakheet told reporters at the end of talks in Amman that the partition of Iraq was unacceptable.
“We cannot accept the partition of Iraq and the partition of Iraq into three parts will increase the intensity of the civil war...” Erdogan said. Ankara fears that the sectarian violence could rip Iraq apart and is anxious about the advent of a Kurdish state in northern Iraq that could fan separatism among its own Kurds.
