One recent one from Healing Iraq: >>Meanwhile in Baghdad
In a very disturbing development at the Hurriya district, west of Baghdad, two women from the Sunni Al-Bu Khalifa clan were kidnapped from their residence by an armed group last Thursday. They were found dead later and their corpses are still at the Medico-legal Institute of Baghdad.
Residents of Hurriya have mentioned on several Iraqi websites that the two women, Hadiya Ibrahim Abd and her daughter, Karima Dawud Mutlag, attempted to resist the attackers but the house was broken into and the women were taken away. Some Sunnis in Hurriya claim that the attackers were members of the Mahdi Army, adding they were accompanied by several unmarked vehicles belonging to the Iraqi Interior Ministry.
It should be noted that the Hurriya district has been plagued by dozens of violent sectarian incidents over the last few weeks, with many Sunni families asserting that they are the victims of an ongoing campaign of assassinations and kidnappings by armed groups associated with the Office of the Martyr Al-Sadr (which maintains four branches in the Hurriya district), and that local police forces are heavily involved in many of these incidents.
An inside source at the Hurriya police station stated that sympathetic policemen would notify the local Sadr offices during unannounced visits by American forces so that they would have time to hide their weapons and any hostages held at the offices. He added that Sadr’s offices routinely collect information on Sunni families residing at Hurriya.
Hurriya is a Shia majority district of western Baghdad, located between Kadhimiya and Shu’la. Its population is mostly Shia but the first and third sections of the district (Hurriya Al-Uwla and Hurriya Al-Thaltha) contain sizeable Sunni communities, most of which hail from the Anbar governorate, west of Iraq. There have been countless tit-for-tat assassinations going on in the district and surrounding areas since the Samarra shrine bombing last February. Several husseiniyas and mosques have been attacked and there were a couple of suicide attacks over the last few months. A large number of Sunni families have been forced to leave the district.
The two victims were from the Al-Bu Khalifa clan, part of the powerful Dulaim tribe in western Iraq. Several members of the clan were kidnapped and assassinated in the vicinity of Hurriya. The two women were the widow and daughter of Dawud Mutlag Al-Dulaimi, who was assassinated earlier this year among several other relatives. The Al-Bu Khalifa clan, like most clans of the Dulaim, strongly supports the insurgency.
Not surprisingly, the Dulaim tribe has refused to reclaim the corpses from the Baghdad morgue until they have taken vengeance. Killing women is considered a major crime in tribal code. Friday sermons at Ramadi have mentioned the murders of the two women and have called on “the resistance to swiftly respond to this crime and to put an end to the criminal activities of these militias, at a time when the state is powerless to protect its citizens.” They specifically appealed to the 1920 Revolution Brigades, the Islamic Army and the Mujahideen Army to take revenge for this “crime against the honour of Iraqi women.”
You can bet that the response will be in the form of more suicide attacks, like today’s bombing at Sadr City, and random assassinations of Shi’ite civilians in western Baghdad, since it’s virtually impossible to identify the killers.
Meanwhile, Muqtada’s influence on the ragtag army he created is waning, the same as his grip on reality. Yesterday, at the Kufa mosque, he was babbling that the Pentagon has a large file on Imam Al-Mahdi, complete save for mug shots of the 9th century Hidden Imam. “America has been preparing rapid intervention forces against the awaited Imam Al-Mahdi for the last ten years,” he told his audience. “They incited the Gulf War to fill the region with warships for just that purpose.”
UPDATE: The reprisals and counter-reprisals were sooner than I imagined. A Sunni insurgent group claimed responsibility for the bombing in Sadr City that targeted civilians stocking up fuel in preparation for Ramadhan, adding that it was to avenge the Sunnis that were killed in Hurriya, Thursday.
In return, nine Sunnis were arrested at a wedding feast in eastern Baghdad by gunmen in uniform. They were all found later executed. All nine men were members of the Dulaim.
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Another alarming trend that continues is the kidnappings and assassinations of top Iraqi surgeons and physicians. Seven of Iraq’s finest specialists were found killed over the last two months, according to Iraqi health sources.
ENT surgeon at the Medical City Hospital in Baghdad, Dr. Mudhar Al-Ani, was kidnapped from his residence by an armed group in Interior Ministry forces uniform. He was found unconscious at a waste disposal location and survived.
Dr. Shukur Arsalan, a respected Maxillofacial surgeon from a Shi’ite Turkmen family in Kirkuk, and professor at the Medicine College of Baghdad University, was not so lucky. He was assassinated while leaving his clinic at Harthiya by unknown gunmen.
Dr. Adil Al-Mansouri, also a professor of Maxillofacial surgery at Baghdad University, was kidnapped by gunmen in uniform near the Ibn Al-Nafis Hospital in Baghdad. His mutilated corpse was found at the outskirts of Sadr City.
Oncoplastic surgeon, Dr. Ahmed Abdul Qadir Al-Rifa’I was kidnapped from his clinic, and the police discovered his corpse at the Al-Sadda, north of Sadr City.
Neurologist Dr. Lu’ay Mas’ud, also kidnapped weeks ago by men in uniform, was found killed in the same area.
Dr. Uday Al-Beiruti, ENT specialist and professor at Al-Nahrain University, was kidnapped from the garage of the University’s hospital at Kadhimiya by gunmen in Interior Ministry uniform. His battered corpse turned up behind Al-Sadda, north of Sadr City.
Internal Medicine specialist, Dr. Tawfiq Al-Khishali, was kidnapped from his clinic and his corpse was located at western Baghdad.
Five of the assassinated doctors were Sunni and two were Shia.
A large part of the corpses that are surfacing in Baghdad these days have been recovered from the area known as Al-Sadda (the levee), which separates districts northeast of Baghdad (Sha’ab, Ur, Sadr City, Ubaidi) from the vast waste disposal area. People in the area speak of dozens of tattered corpses amid piles of rubbish and fetid swamps, and they recount harrowing tales of gunmen, often described as Mahdi militiamen, dumping new corpses every night.
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I just received word from friends back in Baghdad that two people on our street were assassinated yesterday. They were about my age and I knew them very well. Also, two Internet café owners were killed. One of them was my wireless internet provider until he was threatened by gunmen, who were collecting donations for ‘the resistance,’ and had to close down his café. The other guy I also knew closely because I used to frequent his café to post updates for this blog during 2003 and 2004.
As expected, things have deteriorated again in my neighbourhood despite a brief lull when American and Iraqi army forces closed down the area for a week to search for weapons. Not a day goes by now without someone I know getting killed. I feel tormented because my family is going back home from Jordan in a week or so. I fear the worst, and over the last few days I’ve been suffering tremendous guilt because I’m here and not there with them. They tell me that there’s nothing I can change anyway, but still. It’s starting to get in the way and I’m almost always distracted and thinking about this.
I had a bad dream last night. I was issued some sort of an ID card by the Health Ministry (I actually did have such a card when I was back in Iraq but I lost it somewhere), and I was showing it to my family. My father was not happy with it and said that there was no way I’m going out anywhere with that card. There was nothing wrong with it, except that it had my tribal surname. I was arguing with them that it was much more neutral than my national ID card because that one had the name of my district and anyone could get killed just for that.
I woke up in tears and realised that I had that dream because my brother, Nabil, had our home address on his student ID. Over two weeks ago, in Amman, I was yelling and strongly urging him to remove that detail if he is to go back. I don’t know what I would do if anything happened to my younger brother. The nightmares are still haunting me.
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