France 24 : Gunmen kill 29 villagers north of Baghdad

Gunmen kill 29 villagers north of Baghdad

AFP News Brief | July 17, 2007

Gunmen dressed in Iraqi military uniforms murdered 29 villagers overnight in the restive Diyala province northeast of Baghdad, an Iraqi military spokesman told AFP on Tuesday.

Armed men stormed Duwailiyah and killed men, women and children, Colonel Raghib Rawi al-Omaili, spokesman for the Iraqi military in Diyala said.

"Twenty-nine villagers were killed and four were wounded in the terrorist attack on the village of Duwailiyah," he said, adding that the victims included women and children.

"The gunmen were wearing Iraqi military uniforms to confuse the victims."

The attack was grimly reminescent of a similar attack in May in the remote village of Qara Lus in the same province, in which gunmen wearing Iraqi military uniforms dragged 16 villagers from their homes and shot them dead.

The Diyala province, one of Iraq's deadliest regions, is currently the target of a major US-led operation focused on the provincial capital of Baquba.

But as US and Iraqi forces have pushed through the city militants appear to have fled to more outlying areas, carrying out a blistering series of attacks on remote towns and villages.

On July 7, a suicide truck bomb in the village of Emerli just north of the province killed more than 150 people and wounded hundreds in one of the deadliest attacks since the start of the Iraq war in 2003.