NYT : Attackers Kill 39 in Iraq; Massacre Details Emerge

Attackers Kill 39 in Iraq; Massacre Details Emerge

By ALISSA J. RUBIN | Published: July 18, 2007

BAGHDAD, July 17 — Assassinations and car bombs killed at least 39 people in Iraq on Tuesday and details emerged of a massacre of Shiite civilians in Diyala Province on Monday in which at least 29 people were killed.

One car bomb on Tuesday exploded in the Zayouna neighborhood of Baghdad, the capital, killing 20 people, four of them Iraqi Army soldiers, and wounding 20, according to a police official at the Interior Ministry.

An area of middle-class Shiites, Sunni Arabs and Christians, Zayouna is known for its garden and plant stores. The target of the attack appeared to be a passing Iraqi Army patrol.

Another car bomb, this one near the Iranian Embassy, killed four people, according to an Interior Ministry official. The police also reported finding 24 bodies in the city on Tuesday.

In Diyala, police officials said the attack on the hamlet of Dulayiya, a Shiite community, came during the late afternoon Monday as people who had generators gathered to watch the Iraqi soccer team face off against the sultanate of Oman in the Asian Games.

A village of 30 to 35 houses, Dulayiya, referred to in earlier military reports as Adwala, is in an isolated area in the countryside north of Baquba, the provincial capital. It is populated by members of the Bawi tribe, a large tribe in Diyala Province.

Gunmen wearing Iraqi Army uniforms and driving civilian pickup trucks surrounded several houses on one side of the village, the police said. It was not clear if they shot at the houses or dragged people out of them and then executed them, but police officers who reached the area on Tuesday said mostly young men were killed and that the gunmen later mutilated 10 of the bodies.

American military forces have engaged in major operations in the province for the past month and have succeeded in dislodging from Baquba Sunni extremists associated with Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a home-grown group with some foreign involvement that has claimed a loose affiliation with Osama bin Laden’s terrorist network. But many of the militants appear to have moved to the province’s outlying areas, where they are terrorizing the population.

“After we cleaned the western area of Baquba and got support from civilians for the security plan, the terrorists set plans to attack the simple villages outside Baquba and we expect that they will target other areas,” said Col. Ragheb Radhi al-Omairi of the police.

He added that messages had gone out to all checkpoints before the attack that only soldiers driving Humvees should be trusted and that anyone who saw people in Iraqi Army uniforms but not in Humvees should reportthem. “The Iraqi Army forces are using only Humvees,” he said.

A witness, who said he was too upset to give his name, said he believed that Sunni Arab insurgent groups were responsible for the attack, in which 12 of his relatives died.

“This is sectarian revenge,” he said. “Nine families were annihilated in our village and two Shiite families were annihilated two days ago in Harbitila village. Now just the women and children are still alive. It’s an order to the families to leave.”

The mass attack was the third of its kind in Diyala Province. A year and a half ago, in roughly the same area, 19 civilians were killed in Zahawi. And nine months ago, 21 civilians in the Baladruz region were killed in a single attack, according to police officials in Diyala.

The violence on Tuesday included an attack on a judge in Salahuddin Province north of Baghdad. Gunmen wearing uniforms of the security forces stopped Judge Hamdi Habeeb al-Jubori at a fake checkpoint as he was heading home and shot him to death, according to Col. Hameed Majeed of the Tikrit police. The director of a local hospital was also killed Tuesday in a shooting that wounded three people driving with him in his car, provincial officials said.

In Wasit Province south and east of Baghdad, the Iraqi police found five bodies floating in the Tigris River. They were all civilians, bore marks of torture and had been shot multiple times, said a police official in Kut, the provincial capital. A truck driver was also killed in the area. Afterward, the gunmen burned the truck, which was loaded with food and was headed to Baghdad.

Following a particularly deadly bomb attack on Monday in Kirkuk, Kurdish officials made a potentially controversial proposal on Tuesday to send pesh merga fighters from Kurdistan to secure oil pipelines in the province and to help with local security, said Koors Rasul, a deputy from the Kurdistan Regional Government.

“An agreement was reached with the central government to send 6,000 soldiers of Kurdistan to guard the outskirts of Kirkuk, to protect oil pipeline and power transmission lines,” Mr. Rasul said. Such an agreement could not be confirmed with the central government.

The Kurdish region is semi-autonomous. Oil-rich Kirkuk is a politically delicate area. Kurds would like to include the city and surrounding area in Kurdistan and have moved aggressively into the city, angering Turkmen and Arab residents who feel they are being driven out.

In Parliament, the political bloc loyal to the anti-American Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr halted its four-and-a-half-week boycott and began to attend sessions again. The legislators had stopped participating in protest of the bombing of a revered Shiite shrine in Samarra in June. It was the second time that the mosque had been attacked.

The bloc returned after winning a commitment from the government to rebuild the compound and secure it, and to rebuild several other recently destroyed shrines, both Sunni and Shiite.

Ali Adeeb and Qais Mizher contributed reporting from Baghdad, and Iraqi employees of The New York Times from Diyala, Kut, Kirkuk and Salahuddin.