Iraq province loses 9,000 to sectarian killing Sat Oct 21, 8:38 AM ET
The bloodsoaked Iraqi province of Diyala has seen 9,000 of its citizens killed and at least 31,500 forced to flee since the fall of Saddam Hussein, its police chief has said.
Defending the scope of an aggressive new security operation, Major General Ghassan Adnan al-Bawi told lawmakers Saturday that his force was dealing with a massive campaign of sectarian cleansing in the killing fields north of Baghdad.
In the three years and seven months since the US invasion, Sunni and Shiite death squads in Diyala have been battling it out for one of Iraq's most fertile and religiously mixed areas.
"The situation in Diyala needs widescale rather than limited operations," Bawi told the provincial council when a Sunni legislator claimed his security drive had contributed to a climate of fear choking life in Diyala.
Bawi said 420 date palm plantations had been burned down in the fighting -- 350 belonging to Shiites and 70 to Sunnis -- while 45 Shiite shrines and mosques have been blown up or defiled by Sunni extremists.
Giving an example of the dangerous task facing his officers, he said a squad had been unable to recover six bodies lying in a major Baquba street that morning because of the cross-fire and were waiting for US air cover.
Among the 9,000 dead, 7,000 were Shiites, as were 4,500 of the 5,200 displaced families driven from their homes, Bawi said.
Diyala's civilians have been particularly targeted by Sunni extremists attempting to set up a religiously pure emirate, but more recently there have also been reports of Shiite militia groups mounting bloody counterattacks.
Bawi's comments came after a Sunni member of the provincial council, Mahdi al-Juburi blamed the police "quick response operation" for the paralysis of business and administration in the provincial capital Baquba.
But the police officer countered with the accusation that notes distributed in the city asking people not to go to their offices "were printed at some government offices with the support of the officials at these offices". |
