Family of ten killed by gunmen

Its called LIBERATION, people of Iraq. As Georgie see it, I am, you know, amazed that this is a society which so wants to be free that they're willing to - you know, that there's a level of violence that they tolerate," By Ammar Karim in Baghdad
October 14, 2006 10:26pm

GUNMEN murdered a Shiite family of 10 just south of Baghdad in part of the bloody campaign of sectarian cleansing that is plaguing rural areas outside the Iraqi capital.

Late yesterday, gunmen attacked a farmhouse in Saifiyah and killed an entire family, including five women and three children, in an attack apparently motivated by sectarian hatred.

The Shiite village is located in a mostly Sunni area, and for the past month gunmen believed to have links to local Sunni tribes have been attacking Shiite villagers, storming isolated farmhouses and killing the occupants.

Bands of Shiite militiamen arrived from Baghdad a week ago and engaged the tribesmen in a gunbattle that eventually prompted the intervention of US forces.

Many Shiite villagers have already fled the area, part of a trend all over the country that has seen more than 100,000 people displaced from their homes in the past three years.

Iraqi police found the corpses of 14 murder victims scattered around the city of Baghdad between dawn yesterday and today, many of them riddled with bullets and showing signs of torture.

Just downstream from the capital, in the village of Suweira, another four bodies were fished out of the Tigris river, all lacking their heads.

The violence was not restricted to the capital, however, and just to the north, in Balad, police reported finding their own grim harvest of corpses, with 26 bodies discovered around the town.

The men had all been kidnapped this morning from a fruit and vegetable market south of the city. They were taken away, tied up, tortured and then shot in the head, said police.

While bombs explode during the day in the beleaguered capital, shadowy death squads prowl the city by night, killing Iraqis from rival religious communities and leaving their tortured bodies to be found in the morning.

The daily toll of corpses has increased during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, in what a US military spokesman described as a "tremendous spike" in violence.

Most of the killings have been laid at the feet of Shiite death squads, many with links to radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army militia. Yesterday the preacher denounced groups carrying out such killings in his name.

In other Baghdad violence, two members of the National Police were wounded when a roadside bomb exploded near their patrol today.

Two car bombs also exploded in the centre of the city, setting several vehicles alight and sending a thick plume of smoke up over the Tigris, but only wounding one man.

In the capital's southern neighbourhood of Abu Chir, a scene of constant violence, five members of a family were wounded when a mortar round crashed into their house.

Alongside the sectarian killings, mortar duels between rival neighbourhoods have taken their own toll on the city's residents.

In Diyala province northeast of Baghdad, the Iraqi army reported that six gunmen and a female bystander were killed during a clash with US and Iraqi forces southwest of the provincial capital of Baquba.

Two civilians were also killed by gunmen in Baquba itself, and a shopkeeper was shot dead in the central city of Samarra.

Gunmen killed a teacher in the southern city of Diwaniyah in a drive-by shooting, said police, adding that they did not know why the victim was targeted.

Revenge was apparently the motive when a Baathist official with the former regime of Saddam Hussein was dragged from his house this morning by gunmen in the southern city of Amara.

His body was later found near the bus station, police said.

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