Death toll surges in Iraq killings By CHRISTOPHER BODEEN, Associated Press Writer
1 hour, 13 minutes ago
The death toll in a surge of sectarian killings in Balad swelled to at least 91 on Monday, police and army officials said, while bombings in and near Baghdad killed as many as up to 10 people. Eleven more bodies were found dumped in the capital.
Two Marines and a soldier were killed in fighting Sunday, bringing to ten the number of U.S. troops killed in Iraq over the past three days.
The Marines, assigned to Regimental Combat Team 5, were killed in fighting in volatile Anbar province, while the soldier was killed when his vehicle was hit by a roadside bomb outside Baghdad.
Sectarian fighting exploded over the weekend in Balad and nearby regions, 80 kilometers (50 miles) north of Baghdad. The bloodshed began with the slayings of 17 Shiite workers on Friday.
Shiites swiftly retaliated by setting up roadblocks, dragging off and killing those Sunnis they caught.
A police officer in the nearby Sunni-dominated town of Duluiyah said members of the Mahdi Army militia loyal to anti-U.S. cleric Muqtada al-Sadr had moved into the area and were killing Sunni men and boys.
Local police were aiding the militias, said the officer, repeating a common claim made against the Shiite-dominated security forces.
Balad is a predominantly Shiite city, ringed by Sunni-dominated villages, towns and farmland.
Bodies of victims of Balad's Sunni minority lay in the streets, while elderly people and women were being forced to leave the city, said the officer, who spoke on condition on anonymity for fear of reprisals.
Scores of terrified Sunnis had fled to Duluiyah and other neighboring towns, the policeman said.
Ahmed Ali, a 32-year-old Sunni truck driver who was trying to reach his wife's family in Balad, said Sunni families in neighboring towns have armed themselves to fight-off militia raids.
He said he'd been told his in-laws were killed on Friday.
"Militiamen gave them just two hours to leave the house. But after half an hour, they broke into the house and killed four of them," Ali said.
An army officer at provincial headquarters said authorities have counted 74 Sunnis killed since Friday.
The latest deaths came when Sunni houses were attacked with mortars late Sunday, killing five people, including a child, and injuring five others, said the officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to talk to media.
Despite those reports, a spokesman for the Iraqi Interior Ministry, which controls the police, denied knowledge of any widespread violence.
"The situation is calm," Brig. Abdul-Karim Khala said.
In Suwayrah, 40 kilometers (25 miles) south of Baghdad, nine people were killed and 35 injured when a booby-trapped car exploded in a crowded market at about 11:00 a.m. (0800 GMT), the town's mayor, Hussein Mohammed al-Ghurabi, said.
Police earlier said ten people were killed and 48 injured in the attack, which set cars and shops aflame.
Elsewhere, a pair of bombs that exploded an hour apart on Baghdad's Rasheed Street killed one policeman. Iraqi insurgents have increasingly used secondary bombings to inflict further casualties on onlookers and rescue workers.
Two other roadside bomb attacks on Iraqi police patrols early Monday injured seven people.
The bullet-riddled bodies of 11 men were found dumped in the capital overnight, two of them found in a trash pit in Sadr City, the sprawling Shiite slum of about 2 million people
The identities of the victims, estimated to be in their early 20s and found bound and blindfolded, were not known, police Capt. Mohannad al-Bahadli said.
Nine other bodies, similarly bound and shot, were found in other Baghdad districts, police said.
Each day in Baghdad brings the discovery of up to scores of such victims, most believed to have been pulled off the street or abducted from their homes by roving sectarian death squads.
Those killings have steadily worsened over recent months as Iraq's Shiite majority battles to assert its authority over the Sunni minority who held power under Saddam Hussein's former regime. |
